Testing Fate With an Eight-Buck Notebook
For forty years now, I have written on scraps, old looseleaf, and green-tinted steno notebooks (both sides). I did not want to be precious about my ideas or my scribbled rough drafts.
Dispatches
Technology and Stories
The change in film technology is another of those things, like the technology of warfare itself, that sometimes leave us agog, like British Army officers sitting atop camels in a desert and watching one of the first biplanes fly past.
The Elephant on the Patio
I have watered this plant copiously, backed off watering, fed her miracles, scooted her huge pot inch by inch toward more light. I feel like an ardent suitor who cannot win my love’s heart.
The Slow Joy of Guarding the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bringley’s gift is to make the scholarly approachable—and delightful. In that decade at the Met, he developed a method. Rather than hunt for some extraordinary characteristic highlighted by the experts, he does nothing, just stares, spending those first minutes in a work of art’s presence by absorbing all he can without attaching any initial judgment, and he refuses to worry about what the art-world elite think.
A Brand Ends But the Idea Remains
Anchor Steam was part of my first awareness, in the 1970s, that different traditions were at work elsewhere, and that people who might know such things believed those traditions and processes and products were superior to what mainstream corporations provided on a much bigger scale.
Slouching Toward Chatbots
In some ways, we seem to want AI to replace us. Or at least to replace the people too foolish to fall in love with us or too impatient to adore our flaws.
Seeing The Doctor
“The Doctor” mocks identity politics even as it turns them against us, casting women as men and White actors as Black characters. After years of all of us choosing up sides, art proves the project impossible.
The Case for Travel
Travel, done with an open heart, stitches new connections. It is a way to not feel lonely.
Old—and New—New York
Few of us know New York inside-out. That means we are all in this together, looking hard, following breadcrumbs and tips and our GPS. I inhale deeply and realize the city runs on coffee and cannabis.
Encountering ‘The Bear’
While “The Bear” has been nominated for comedy awards, and Jeremy Allen White has won some of them, there is a dark streak of pain not easily reconciled to the comedy of situation and its quirky characters, even in the sense of “tragicomedy.”