About six months ago, my wife bought a Kindle. This was a move of serious consequence for a writer whose whole life has centered around books, real books, ones that have heft and smell and whose pages are laid out in pleasing configurations of font size and spacing. But she had two very valid reasons for stepping across what had previously been a border guarded by dragons. First, changes in...
I’ve been telling people that I’ve been under the weather for the last week or so, but I realize that the more accurate cliché is that “I’ve been off my feed.” The animal connotations of this phrase are apparent, but the phrase also represents accurately what’s happened to my eating during this period. The regular dinner menu seems repulsive which is a really unfortunate turn at a time when I’ve...
One of my favorite children’s books is called What Good Luck, What Bad Luck by Remy Charlip. On alternating pages, we follow the vicissitudes (a Fancy Nancy word, another of my favorite books for kids) of the book’s young protagonist. It goes something like this: What good luck! John was invited to a birthday party. What bad luck. The party was in Paris and he was in New York What good luck! A...
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives…If we remember those times and places…where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the...
Unless watching Rachel Maddow every night meets the definition of an addiction, I don’t consider myself particularly prone to them. For a while I smoked cigarettes, probably a Level B or C addiction. How I put it behind me is a story worth telling because it demonstrates the unorthodox ways in which people decide to abandon activities that aren’t good for them. The path isn’t always the one...