This first ran Sept. 22, 2010 — the same time of year as now. It’s not clear that the auction is still going on, and maybe it’s been replaced by a 5K race, and maybe by a bunch of other auctions in different places. The clinic is building a new home and has a lot […]
I’ve written books and didn’t find the experience pleasant: I’d go underground for 2 or 3 or 4 years, maybe 5, and when I’d stick my head up into the light of the world again, the world was changed. Like, during one of my underground sessions, the internet took hold and when I surfaced, the […]
Some smart cookie timed the release of the movie about Robert Oppenheimer to the week of the anniversary of Trinity, the first test of the first nuclear weapon. (Another smart cookie threw in the release of a Barbie movie and a notable Barbenheimer genre was born, but that’s not what this post is about right […]
I’m not sure why I’m interested in what people change their minds about – maybe because I’m at the age where a person looks back and wonders what the hell that was all about. Like, a person of a certain age tries to find the through-lines of life and sees how many of them just […]
Profiling someone who is widely and wildly admired is harder than it ought to be. The word, hagiography, is not a compliment. What’s wrong with an objective profile of someone who’s practically a saint? I still don’t know. These two people here have since died and the world is less shiny for their not being […]
I originally wrote this on October 3, 2012, and I’ve long since lost track of this young man. I hope he and his brother have sorted out their battle about science and religion by now but I sort of doubt they have. And in any case, this same battle is now showing up in different […]
I grew up sewing most of my own clothes and developed an abiding and expensive fixation on beautiful fabric. Once I was in Florence at a store buying fabric, textiles (tessuti), as a gift for my mother. I stipulated in toddler-Italian a light wool (leggera lana) in blue (blu) for a dress for my mother […]
January is such a bitch. I have personal reasons to feel this and so do most of the people I talk to: bad things are happening or anniversaries of bad things have come around again. People are losing their jobs; they’re having non-trivial surgical procedures; kids are having urgent psychiatric problems; relatives are seriously sick; […]