Sometimes you know the universe is at work when the metaphorical intersects with the personal. When my car suddenly shuddered and seemed to slip out of gear as I was trying to get over the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge to Long Island, my next self-assignment, I pushed harder on the gas, thinking I […]
The feeling comes over me at unexpected times—walking down a street of stone townhomes at dawn, lights in bay windows, stairs and gardens mounded with new snow. Sensing that the skyscraper-as-public-art was designed instead as a taunt and a cashing-in on disaster. Leafing through a glossy magazine filled with photos of socialites smiling as […]
Visitors this weekend who still needed to buy tickets in person to the One World Observatory, the highest place above New York City, were directed to a half-dozen digital kiosks in the building’s ground-floor lobby in Lower Manhattan. Not all the machines were in service, and those that were insisted glitchily, repeatedly, that […]
The little cartoon drawings, photographs, and spinal-column diagrams strike a nerve. They show people slumping and slouching like I do, standing with their shoulders hunched forward and their necks out like a turtle’s. The body was made to stand and sit erect, “stacked” as the physical therapists say, one vertebra over another so […]
I grew up in Philadelphia, where not liking soft pretzels is akin to not liking a Philly cheese steak, which means not being a true Philadelphian at all. When I was a boy, I bought soft pretzels from old guys who sold them from wooden hand carts situated on downtown street […]
1. In the Shed I taught a class in the fall of 2020 entitled “Barack Obama and the Idea of the African American Presidency.” This AFAS course was created for two reasons: First, it was thought a good idea for AFAS to have a course about Obama and a course […]
Thanksgiving is here, and we who invented the holiday are squirming as usual. We have been subjected to a series of (usually commercial) exhortations to be grateful (and show it by buying something). Pop psychology has tossed a lot of mawkish reflection in the same direction, insisting we make gratitude lists and feel […]
After co-directing a succession of award-winning documentaries with Ken Burns, Lynn Novick stepped forward to direct one on her own, with Sarah Botstein as producer, and Burns stepped back to be their executive producer. Filmed over four years at maximum- and medium-security prisons in New York state, College Behind Bars focuses on the Bard […]
Recently, I came across some essays I had written a few years back. These stories were mostly autobiographical, tales of personal observations and proclamations of personal beliefs. As I read over them, I remembered how quickly my hands had worked to tell these stories, eager to share them with an audience as quickly as I […]
Ours was a table conveniently located in the cool shade of a tree near the principal’s office. Nobody dared to sit there, even if they were the first to be excused for lunch; it belonged to us, the same way the area around the oak tree in the center of the quad belonged to the […]
