The playwright Terence once said, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto,” or, “I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.”

To this writer, that has a lot of resonance.  The reader may end up seeing certain topics recur from time to time, but I remain hopeful there will be a great variety as we go along together.

This is my personal site and it does not represent the viewpoints of my employer at all.

Here’s an edited version of my profile at Wikipedia:

Hal O’Brien describes himself as an “independent scholar”, an all-too-rare breed these days.

He graduated from Midland School in Los Olivos, California, in 1981. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Pomona College in Claremont, California, in 1986. His major was in Government. (“My college was too wise to label politics a science.”)

He’s the kind of guy who has a copy of Bernard Rudofsky’s Are Clothes Modern? that was once owned by Elia Kazan; a copy of Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur that was once owned by Nobel-winning chemist Sir John Kendrew; a letter from Arthur Quiller-Couch to Siegfried Sassoon; a page from Shakespeare’s Second Folio; and he thinks he’s lucky beyond measure to have stuff that pleases him so.

Everything is provisional, pending better data.

Feedback is welcomed here.