Author: admin

Out walking today, I had what I thought was a great moment for a book I’ve been working on for a while. And as is my wont, and as I preach to others, I opened OneNote on my phone and “wrote it down,” which these days often means turning on the speech-to-text facility and speaking…

No, there’s no umlaut over the U. This isn’t über-rape – I don’t want to know what that might be – but Uber- and Lyft-rape. An article in the NY Times suggests this is a significant problem. I mean, even one incident is a serious problem but here I mean significant as in “significant figures,”…

I used to walk around with one of these: This was 1989 or so, and I was freelancing, and needed to be available to clients. Or so I told myself, and indeed I got calls on it from actual, paying clients. (I have the same number thirty-five years later. What I no longer have is…

I came across a survey that says Gen-n would pay considerably more for Broadway theater more when they understand how much work goes into it. Gen-n = anybody younger than me, which at this point is a whole lot of people. And I’ll ignore the fact that the survey was created by folks who have…

The NY Times acrostic today [spoiler alert] is a passage from John McPhee’s Coming Into the Country, a book that was serialized in The New Yorker in 1977. That’s where I came across it. My parents subscribed, and though I was at that time living on my own in Greenwich Village, I probably went “home”…

Jimmy Carter. Peter Yarrow. A former colleague at Microsoft. And of course millions whom I don’t know, every day. But that’s sort of the point. When we’re young, younger anyway, we hear about people dying, but mostly it’s as indirect as those millions I just mentioned. Yes, rarely – I hope rarely – it will…

A jigsaw puzzle is a) a metaphor, b) a way to take a break, c) an excuse to not-write, or d) all of the above. When our kids were young, we used to play the game Memory with them, where you win by remembering where various words are placed in a face-down array of word-cards.…

The New York Times crossword puzzle this morning (Friday) features the following clue (fifteen letters): Shell food? The answer is something I have never considered and hope never to think about again, but I’m afraid it’s going to haunt my nightmares: GasStationSushi Lovely pun, but I get shivers thinking about the actual (possible) product. And…

No humor in this post, either. For the trial for which I flunked out of the jury pool, the defendant was dressed fairly well. He looked middle-class, successful. Until jurors noted the man standing in the back corner of the courtroom when we rose for our (innumerable) breaks. The man was dressed in full police…

A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus And his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth.’ Merry and tragical! tedious and brief!   — Wm. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (V,1) “Tedious brief” could also describe much of the output of lawyers. They write novels, in a Dogberry-like language too convoluted for us mortals. They produce fiction, or…