- Blog
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iPad Air, 20 Days In
Twenty days with the iPad Air, and a quick follow-up. I’m still in love, but the sparks of young romance are evolving into a mature and seasoned relationship. Whoa, that got weird. Anyway, it’s still great, of course, but I will say that despite my delight over the vast reduction in weight, it’s still not…
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Why Use an iPad to Write?
Alan Jacobs, one of my favorite writers, declares that writing on the iPad, as opposed to a laptop, sucks. Lamenting the device’s frustrating limitations as an editor and formatter of text, he concludes: I’m typing this post on my MacBook Air, and it’s a real pleasure. It’s lightweight and fits in my lap nicely. It…
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Sisko’s Restaurant and My Blog: The Star Trek Economy is User-Generated
If you’re deeply into Star Trek, as I am, you’ve wondered what the hell people do all day. Not the folks in Starfleet of course, but, well, everyone else. We are told that within the United Federation of Planets, or at least in Terran society, there is no money, and people labor merely for self-improvement…
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Two-Day Weekends and My Cold, Dead Hands
Joe Wiesenthal creates out of thin air the first-worldiest of all first-world problems. (And I say this as someone who loathes the “first-world problems” faux guilt-tag.) You know what our problem is? Too many days off: Far from everyone has a job where they’re truly stimulated, and get to be around people who provide them…
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Now or Never for Elizabeth Warren
So there’s that new Noam Scheiber piece in The New Republic that everyone’s talking about, positing that Elizabeth Warren could well be the insurgent force that upends the Hillary Clinton presidential coronation. It’s good stuff, though I think it overstates the favorability of the environment for Warren to succeed or mount a serious threat to…
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In Which My Boy Fills Me with Despair for My Own Mortality
I recently wrote about how I had been compelled to introduce the concept of death to my son when he was a little over 2 years old, and how he was momentarily devastated by the idea that, in this instance, a little moth he had crushed was now “broken” and not coming back to life. Well,…
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Longing and Subtext, Future-Proofed
The New York Times rounded up some opinions from authors about the effect of modern technology on one’s ability to write contemporaneously-set fiction, and as you might imagine the perspectives vary widely. These two, however, seemed to represent the poles. On one hand, fiction is based upon conflict, characters having to overcome something. Marisha Pessl…
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I Got Mad at a Clever Hipster Thing for No Good Reason
So this odd thing appeared in my Facebook feed yesterday, originating here, and my first response was rather shockingly visceral, something akin to, “Oh my christ you fucking hipsters I hate that you made that snooty, too-clever, showy-offy, hey-look-I’m-a-maker thing exist, let’s chop it up and burn it before it infects the culture, because now…
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In Russia, Lucky Is Up All Night to Get YOU
I love stuff like this, when a stuffy-seeming artistic institution embraces a piece of pop culture with genuine enthusiasm. However, I feel like I do have to note that there is something a tad menacing about a wall of Russian law enforcement officers boasting how they will be up all night in order to…
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Star Trek’s Human-ish Aliens, Vindicated
The aliens of Star Trek get a bit of grief for looking suspiciously like homo sapiens. I can tell he’s a different species because he has very slight ridges on his nose! She’s clearly an extraterrestrial because she’s got dots on her. And of course he’s an alien! His ears point up, and who would…
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iPad Air: The Zen Device of Choice
I originally thought of the iPad as a kind of novelty; a neat toy for someone who can afford to have a frivolous third (or fourth) device between a smartphone and a laptop, with a Kindle thrown in for good measure. Nifty, but unnecessary. And probably not that useful, overall. I changed my tune when…
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A Boy and His Baby Sister, Through the Chaos
It’s been kind of a rough parenting week. The baby, at 15 months old, is teething (again) and we think has been carrying a stomach bug, which my wife and I now carry for her. You’re welcome, sweetheart! Halloween turned into something of a bust…okay, I’m being generous, it was an outright disaster. My wife…
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The Functional Hair Shirt: The Utility of Regret
Let go of regrets, I am told. They are purposeless, serving as an unnecessary and often-overwhelming burden on my day-to-day life, my relationships, and my peace of mind. Even Toad the Wet Sprocket, perhaps my favorite band, sings in opposition to it: Shame doesn’t become you There are no mistakes in the final view .…
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Creativity and Personality for Cash
Thomas Frank pores over the literature on creativity, and pins down its themes, motivations, and its intended audience: Those who urge us to “think different” . . . almost never do so themselves. Year after year, new installments in this unchanging genre are produced and consumed. Creativity, they all tell us, is too important to…
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