Category: Personal
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How Risk is Changing
The world seems more dangerous today than it ever has before, but study after study shows that we’re safer now. Hans Rosling’s Factfulness, Matt Ridley’s Rational Optimist, and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature are three books that dig into this. In part, life feels more dangerous today because we have so much information about bad things that happen…
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Micro-post: Why I miss “Glee”
The last episode of Glee aired in March of 2015, more than six years ago. I still miss it even though the suds-to-singing ratio got out of whack in the final seasons, so I didn’t watch regularly. Despite the high school soap opera—or maybe because there’s no escape from high school until graduation for most…
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The Nature of Human Thought: “Stop Trying to Make ‘Fetch’ Happen.”
One of the enduring mysteries of everyday cognitive life is why some things pop into our minds. Today’s example for me happened while I was cleaning up the breakfast dishes. Out of nowhere the line, “Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. It’s not going to happen” from the classic movie Mean Girls came to…
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Technologies of Grief
When a family member dies the script is clear: you scramble the jets, cancel your appointments, lean on a friend to watch the dog, and get there. For me, that means getting to Los Angeles from Portland. My aunt, Marlene Meyer, my mother’s sister, died on May 15th. She was 86, vibrant, still working as…
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Analog Pleasures in a Digital World
At first, it was hard to appreciate the elderly woman seven rows in front of us who had a sudden coughing fit during the opening minutes of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” at a recent trip to the symphony. But as I winced through the coughing and throat clearing that sat between us and the orchestra, I…
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My 2018 in Books
This is the fifth year that I’ve kept a running list of every book that I’ve completed for the first time and then shared that list here as the first thing I post on either the last day of the old year or the first of the new. You can see the 2017 list here,…
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“Bohemian Rhapsody” is fantastic: what the critics missed
The Bottom Line: Drop everything, turn off your phones and go see “Bohemian Rhapsody” immediately. The critics are wrong. It’s fantastic. More details: I have a pet theory that critics—subject matter experts of all sorts, really—get so into the weeds of the production of the material they critique that they lose track of why ordinary…
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All the news that’s fit to ignore
I missed the mid-terms last week. It was great. Don’t get me wrong: I voted early by mail, so I did my civic duty. It’s what happened after I dropped my ballot that’s interesting. Due to travel in the wilderness and no access to the internet or other media, on Tuesday, November 6, I didn’t…
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My dystopian vision of the future and TODAY’S terrifying NPR article about health care and your personal data
My science fiction novel Redcrosse came out in 2011: the question behind Redcrosse was, “what would happen if your credit card company and your health insurance company became the same company?” Got high cholesterol? Then don’t order that pepperoni pizza and pay with your credit card because your health insurance premium will go up. In…