I was twelve, I think, when I discovered Berton Roueche, a features writer who had a column called “The Annals of Medicine” in the New Yorker for something like five decades. I believe the Weekly Science Reader (or something like … Continue reading
I’m on a lot of email lists. A lot. I go through every month or so and unsubscribe from as many as I can, but they proliferate. Some of them are sales emails that come from e-commerce sites I may … Continue reading
I’ve written before about Seven Brides for Seven Brothers–a musical with decent lyrics and fabulous dancing, and a sensibility straight out of the Pleistocene. I happened upon the source material this week in a collection of Stephen Vincent Benet short … Continue reading
My younger daughter, 24 as of last week, came up for a flying visit on her way to a volunteer program she’s doing in upstate California next week. She’s an interesting kid (well, I’d say that anyway, wouldn’t I?) and … Continue reading
When you’re a kid, you take people–particularly your relatives–as they appear to you. I remember my grandmother Louise with great fondness and a little amusement: a beautifully turned out woman with gray hair and a mink stole (it was the … Continue reading
‘Tis the season, and because it is, I saw three different versions of A Christmas Carol last week (and completed my annual re-read of the book as well). The first was a stage production done by San Francisco’s A.C.T. Conservatory. … Continue reading
Back in October, I realized that I had a whole book done. I had avoided realizing this for a while because my deep intuition was that it was a sprawling mess, and I didn’t want to show it to anyone … Continue reading
The TV I watched when I was a kid was all the stuff that the Children’s Television Workshop was designed to combat: cartoon violence, constant advertisement, a totally un-diverse reality–ethnically and economically. And I turned out okay, right? I still … Continue reading
Also punctuation. The Little Red School House–the school I went to as a kid–was one of the earliest progressive schools–possibly the first in New York City, where I grew up. The emphasis was on learning by doing and experimentation, and … Continue reading
I am, by nature, a dive-in-and-figure-it-out sort of technology user. This may come from my early days as a computer user, when my then room-mate and sometime business partner dropped a box on my desk and said “we’re doing a … Continue reading
