- Blog
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Love’s Humble and Astounding Magic
A good friend of mine, and a fellow I’ve been honored to share the stage with for several productions, recently gained a daughter-in-law. James Keegan’s son Thomas married Alyssa Wilmoth, both of whom are good friends, former Shakespearean colleagues, and one-time Toby-sitters. James was tasked, as dads are, with delivering a toast at the wedding…
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In an email, Maria Spiropulu, a professor at the California Institute of Technology who works with the CMS team at CERN wrote about the Higgs, “I personally do not want it to be standard model anything — I don’t want it to be simple or symmetric or as predicted. I want us all to have…
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The Terribleness of Two is Apparently in the Eye of the Beholder
Daycare teacher 1, a few weeks ago: “Toby’s being very aggressive with the other kids. He’s doing a lot of pushing, and he’s shouting at the teachers. He’s screaming ‘No!’ at everything, and refusing to do anything we ask him, shouting “I cannot!” It’s been extremely difficult, and we’re trying to work out a system…
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Music. Boy, I Don’t Know.
There are times (and these times grow ever more frequent) that I begin to worry about how little I know about contemporary music. I don’t just mean the crappy teeny bopper nonsense that, like some viruses, die as soon as they’re exposed to the air (although I partly mean that, as ignorance of them removes…
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Things I Can’t Do When I’m Depressed
Listen to music: If it’s somber or richly produced or instrumented (which is the only kind to which I’ll be inclined), it may only depress me further, or at least more deeply entrench me into the ill feeling. If it’s really good, it will further depress me by reminding me of all the music I’m…
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Is it time to pull the plug on Web publishing pioneer Salon.com? (Link)
Is it time to pull the plug on Web publishing pioneer Salon.com? (Link) It seems to me that the problem with the idea of Salon becoming a kind of news nonprofit is not only that it doesn’t have any particular locality’s focus, but that it doesn’t fill any particular need. There is no shortage of…
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Is 2012 Plutocracy’s Last Gasp? (Spoiler: No, it’s Not)
Gary Wills, no knee-jerk liberal he, marks this year’s election as a crucial moment for the right. … this election year gives Republicans one of their last chances—perhaps the very last one—to put the seal on their plutocracy. They are in a race against time. A Democratic wave is rising fast, to wash away the…
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The Tech Press and the Truth
I was rather angered by how the tech press handled the Mike Daisey affair. They seemed to me to be dancing with glee at the prospect of having their consciences somehow cleared because the man delivering the message of the treatment of workers at Foxconn had turned out to be something of a fabulist. Daisey…
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In Praise of Maine at the End of America
George Scialabba, reviewing Morris Berman’s final installment of a trilogy of books diagnosing the ills of our grand experiment, provides of litany of horrifying facts about the dismal state of our country’s brains, morals, priorities, and environment, and writes: Contemplating these dreary statistics, one might well conclude that the United States is — to a…
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In Which I Read the Sam Harris-Bruce Schneier Debate So You Don’t Have To
Long story short: Sam Harris said that we should specifically profile Muslims at airports, not grandmas in wheelchairs and 4-year-old girls, because if someone’s going to try to crash a plane in 2012, it’s almost certainly going to be a radicalized Muslim. Liberals went insane, calling Harris a racist and other terrible things, atheists disowned…
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The Banal Quest for Validation
ZachsMind just posted a very thoughtful response to a post of mine from a few weeks back that seemed to get a wee bit of attention from the Tumblrsphere. The meat of my post that has been a few times bequoted is thus: How many readers does it take to make a blog worthwhile? What…
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Fuselage is a Hilarious Word
The following is a collection of thoughts about air travel that I typed into my iPad’s note program or twiddled into my iPhone’s Twitter client while making my way through the flying process this past weekend. They are in no particular order and have not been edited in any meaningful way from when they were…
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186th Place Would Be Awesome
Charles Wheelan gives some unconventional commencement advice, that, while welcome, I feel misses where the pain and anxiety really sit. He writes: We are systematically creating races out of things that ought to be a journey. We know that success isn’t about simply running faster than everyone else in some predetermined direction. Yet the message…
pav dot quest 