The Art of Interrupting
To decide whether interrupting is rude, you cannot generalize. You need to know the style (verbal and cognitive) of everyone in the conversation, as well as its tone and its level of difficulty.
Dispatches
The Slap Heard Round the World, or What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?
The Oscars have figured out how to make this long, boring show interesting: Have the participants assault each other.
Pillow Talk
To be pillowed, the Urban Dictionary tells us, is to be so exhausted you feel giddy, a little drunk.
An Index to the Index
There is much I never knew in Index, "A History of the, whose subhead promises “A Bookish Adventure from Medieval Manuscripts to the Digital Age.” First, I never realized how jokey indexes could be, or how easily they could pop an overblown ego.
Good Cat
Photo by John Griswold Maybe you have had a cat like our Abbey—everything on her terms, selective in her affections, so distant she seemed half-wild, but firmly part of the family. We adopted her and her “brother” at the same time, when our sons were little. We found…
If We Were Refugees
Some of the Ukrainians fled to other parts of their own country. Keep going, I urged them mentally. You are not safe yet. But where is safe?
A Pandemic Book That Will Erase Your Cynicism
In her book "The Helpers," Kathy Gilsinan has asked questions most reporters do not think to bother with, gathering up tiny details and using the most telling to bring these people to life. You feel you know them, not just casually but the way you know longtime coworkers or neighbors.
Outliving the Military-Grade
Everybody and everything around us are hurtling through time together, so we often experience a relative stillness as we age, just as we stretch and yawn hurtling through space at 872,000 miles per hour. If you ever wondered why Great Uncle Gus fails to register the…
Graffiti As Art; Art as Graffiti
Graffiti is about breaking rules. It ignores convention, shuns commerce. Once Ruggeri had lived long enough, gathered enough perspective from travel and textbooks, and running a bar where souls spilled, he figured out how to channel that energy, and he rediscovered freedom. With raw exhilaration, graffiti unlocked his art.
Sharing the Loo
How did we decide to segregate restrooms in the first place? Some say the segregation began in the rigidly gendered Victorian era, and before the Industrial Revolution, toilets were often communal and mixed. Others point to ancient art that shows the sexes carefully segregated.