The Lyft driver drove to support his passion, he said: standup comedy. He offered his business card, with his website, phone number, and a long URL at Mixstep, a file-sharing platform, where he had uploaded audio from his 45-minute set. He said he was paid 20 cents every time someone…
You gotta love a Netflix series that explores existential dread and the nature of time; an edgier, feminist take on Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin’s classic 1993 comedy, Groundhog Day; and makes allusions to the Divine Comedy, The Odyssey, and the power and confusion of liminal spaces. Plus,…
“You’re particularly fragile today,” a friend in LA told me. Writers are a moody bunch, but I remonstrated. “Actually, I’ve been unaccountably happy this week,” I said, which irritated him more. All I could say to explain was that Russell Crowe and other leading men of my age group had…
Photo by Frankie Valentine on Unsplash. “We can do without pleasure, but not delight.” -Jack Gilbert, from his poem, “A Brief for the Defense” Delight is an RV parked near the barn of my grandparents’ small-town Missouri farm, where the crab apple orchard, blackberry bushes, and…
Trending on Twitter this week for those of us who “can’t even” on the social media site was the textual meme, “5 Jobs I’ve Had.” Like most things born on the Internet, the cultural roots and class-based ramifications of this deceptively simple list say so much more about…
Avengers: Endgame comes out tonight. My son asked if I wanted to see it in the theater, and I said I could wait for streaming. Many feel differently. Word on the street is that some believe the movie is a defining moment in a generation, the way Star Wars was,…
Understanding the Role of Governments in Regulating Economies In 1681, when a group of French businessmen led by M. Le Gendre met the French Controller-General of Finances Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister asked the businessmen how the French state could be of assistance to the merchants. Le Gendre simply replied: “Laissez-nous…
A teen boy broke his leg recently, had surgery, and three weeks later is still bedridden. He wanted to tell me something, he said seriously. I am his primary caregiver, as the phrase goes, which is to say his father and his nurse. As I was shutting the curtains to…
Photo by Rob Hampson on Unsplash. “Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.” –Matsuo Bashō On the day the Lord hath risen, I lost my cell phone between the hours of 8:31 a.m. and 10:38 a.m. The phone, unfortunately, has been missing in action for…
“Creating a narrative based on one photograph can be challenging. In this case, my imagination placed me in the heart of the main subject dreaming of his old country, Mother Russia. Or perhaps he imagines talking to his dearly departed mamma, saying, ’Mama, I love You.’” (Photo by Donato DiCamillo)…