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 […]
Ann
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; […]
Yesterday I was interviewed about the Finkbeiner Test for the Change Artist Podcast (episode will go live at a later date). While gathering up some links to share, I realized that it was exactly ten years ago — January 17, 2013 — that Ann wrote the LWON post that would become the world-renowned Finkbeiner Test. […]
I wrote this on January 1, 2018. A lot had happened already, and more has happened since. At the time, I wasn’t sure what I was writing about but I see now more clearly that it’s about living with the memories of what’s happened. So I’ll repeat my wish of walking, memories and all, into […]
Ann: Nine, or who’s counting, ten years ago the consummate professional and pot-stirrer, Dan Vergano, and I posted a conversation about the science writer’s sad place in the media. Dan called this place the science ghetto, though I’m pretty sure we can come up with a better term — a bubble? A walled garden? The […]
One Saturday the bean man wasn’t at the farmers’ market, he was always there every week, and I asked the woman who works with him, “Where is he?” “He just died,” she said. “This morning early. We were getting ready to come to the market and we found him. We called the ambulance. But the […]
We’re thinking about Queen Elizabeth these days, or at least I am. She just soldiered on, didn’t she — did her duty. That word, duty, isn’t as popular as it used to be and maybe that’s good, maybe not. The Queen certainly never stopped doing it, I’ll bet she died thinking about her duty. Anyway, […]