HOURS LATER, WE'D COMPLETED the reading. A pot of green tea had filled and refilled a pair of stout coffee cups repeatedly as we worked our way through it. An empty plate held only the crumbs of sinfully rich toll-house cookies with butterscotch chips. (Ensuring that I would be visiting the exercise room tomorrow and probably every day as long as Peter's cooking kept feeding me this way.)
"You have questions," Peter said. His mild, but direct style had grown on me. He was still reading me like an open book, but was careful to leave my sentence endings alone.
I began, "Let me state the obvious first. The core problem is religion. Or rather lack of it. Except for the bi-coastal megalopolises, no one is believing what passes for 'news' and both newspapers and news media are losing reader/vi
