I did try. During the Great Lockdown, I made a habit of driving to nearby parking lots and worked for an hour, sweaty and uncomfortable, in the car. Deliberately left alone, our new pandemic pup began the hour by wooing so loudly and mournfully, I had to force my foot onto the gas pedal. Then […]
When Trevor Noah came to this country, he sensed more hate than he had experienced in apartheid South Africa. He shrugged it off on 60 Minutes last week: “That’s welcome to America, you know. . . . There’s a lot of hate in America because there is a lot of anger in America.” Put […]
Taking a break from writing on Christmas Eve, I watched a few episodes of an old jungle adventure series called Ramar of the Jungle, something that baby boomers probably remember as a live-action staple of their children’s television programming (along with Our Gang and The Three Stooges comedy shorts). The show was similar […]
Trust your gut. Do not get your bowels in an uproar. Do you have the stomach for this? Turns out we have spoken, all along, the truth that is now one of the hottest new topics in neuroscience: the power our internal organs have to modulate our feelings, our decisions, our lives. […]
For all the hype, the metaverse is not yet a thing—but rest assured, it will be. Piling up definitions, I try to fathom the notion. A fancied-up internet, some say with a shrug. A simple switch from phone to headset. “Virtual reality with unskippable ads” (Wendy Liu). “The ultimate distraction machine” (Peter West). […]
I must have been 12 or 13 when someone, perhaps my Sunday school or perhaps my public school, took a class of us children to see G.F. Handel’s Messiah. It was during the Christmas season and I had to dress up for it. I knew nothing about this music. Except for one part, I […]
“Filmmaking is cheating . . .” —Film Editor and Director Peter Hunt¹ “With Goldfinger, the Bond writers created a new agent, an indestructible man who would survive any situation. It was no longer a question of whether Bond would survive, it merely became a case of which button he would push, or […]
How would your understanding of the religion’s immensity change if you could sit, tiny and quiet, in front of the crossed legs of a 233-foot Buddha sculpted fifteen hundred years ago? Would planetary science carry a little more intrigue if you could see, close up, what Mars looks like? Would Shakespeare’s role […]
If not all of America’s, mine at least. It fell out once before. Lots of it at once, I mean. Hanks. I wrote it off to turning fifty; my mother used to talk about “evil hormones” and I was beginning to understand her theology. But then my hair grew back. When you are […]
I liked printing AMDG (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam) at the top of my grade school assignments. All for the greater glory of God. In other words, ego could be cast aside. You tried your hardest and let the chips fall. Latin felt like an extra layer of purpose, a way to transform even […]
