“Planes, Trains,” and Technology
It must seem odd to our children that this movie presents certain problems as insuperable, but then most Americans under the age of thirty have never known a time like the one portrayed.
By Todd Decker
Donut Scoff, Friends
The stretch of coastal Louisiana called Acadiana, from the Texas border to almost New Orleans, is often sold as a foodie culture, though its people would never call it that. The Francophone foodway has adapted to local resources, so French mirepoix, for instance, (carrots, celery, onion) became the Cajun “holy…
The Louisiana Elegies
Coastal Louisiana is sinking, and the sea is rising, faster than anywhere on earth. Water cuts through everything—in gutters, culverts, ditches, swales, bayous, rivers, estuaries, channels, and lakes. Tropical downpours flood the streets, stall traffic, pour over doorsills into homes. Geysers spurt out of manhole covers. Cattle stand…
Knowing Puddles
Puddles, in the shadow of his greatness. Puddles Pity Party was in town last night. I felt like the guy in front of me in line for the second Star Wars movie, in 1980, who poured bags of loose change onto the ticket counter and cried,…
Clark Gable Will Never Quit
San Francisco (1936) is a four-star film at Turner Classic Movies. It stars Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, and Spencer Tracy, and is set in the months leading up to the 1906 earthquake. IMDB says it is about “A Barbary Coast saloonkeeper and a Nob Hill impresario [who] are rivals for…
Upon This Rock
Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the search of the depth? —Job 38:16 The Old Minster at Winchester Cathedral was built in 645 AD. By the year 1000 there was a cathedral there about one-third…
The Apparition of a Face in the Crowd
I went to a reading the other night for someone I have known for a decade. I call him a friend, but really we are something between Facebook friends and former colleagues who rarely saw each other in person. We have kept in spotty touch, and several times he was…
Consider the Cell Tower
It is easy not to see the landscape in its entirety, but consider too the manmade—the microwave towers, radio masts, and cell towers rising up stiffly in the fields; the lattice pylons, tube towers, and concrete or wood utility poles that help make our electrical grid “the largest interconnected machine on Earth”; guardrails like staples in a wound; 26 million streetlights vying with moon and stars.
Of Focus and Technology
Brace yourself: I have discovered an American middle-class couple who leave their phones on the kitchen table when they work elsewhere in the house or in their yard, and they do not check them when they come back. They also turn their phones off at night, and when they leave…
Everything Old Must Be Sold Again
In just about every measure the American middle- and upper-middle class act like new money. One need only glance at photos on social media that portray consumption and appearance to see that our culture violates all the “golden rules” —if you…
Rocket Men
NPR ran a story this week on a new “space mining” program at the Colorado School of Mines, which turned out to be misleading. In reality, it is “The first program in the world focused on educating scientists, engineers, economists, entrepreneurs, and policy makers in the developing…
If We Had Money
A parlor game for those with more pallor than parlor: What would we do if we had no debts, no deadlines, nowhere we had to be? (No restrictions at all is so silly it shatters the fantasy; there are no games without rules.) The dollar amounts are not so large,…