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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…

I’ve been called for jury duty. I’ve served before, and I consider it a privilege. Not an unmitigated privilege, of course – waiting around, transportation woes, more waiting, making sure my hearing aids have sufficient battery, wait some more, and then argue with five or eleven other people about what we heard and what it…

Why do businesses hector users with subscription requests when they already subscribe? Case in point #1: I subscribe – as in pay money – to NPR+. Part of the pitch for NPR+ podcasts is that subscribers don’t have to listen to ads. Yet on both Planet Money and Short Wave podcasts this morning, they shoved…

I was just trying to clean my jacket, and I saw this stuff sitting on the tub. I mean, clean coats, right? Maybe not…

When The Pogues’ “first” album – Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash – was released in 1985, I was blown away by the raw energy of their sound. The band was led by Shane MacGowan, whose death was announced today, and who at the time was recognized as much for his bad teeth as his music.…