Category: Posts
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Media of the moment
An ongoing series Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer by Steven Johnson. My favorite author does it again, using his signature storytelling savvy to explain how human life expectancy has doubled in the last century. Vaccines, epidemiology, pasteurization, drug regulation, penicillin, and automobile safety sound like dry topics, but how they came to…
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No disclaimers
As a drummer in my college’s jazz program, I once got recruited by one of the jazz guitarists for a paying gig he’d gotten at a local restaurant. I was interested not just because of the money, which was negligible (not that there is such a thing for broke college kids) but because the idea…
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Recent Views
More photography here and on my Instagram. Shoutout to this Ameritech relic on a power box: Little Mr. Autumn Man: That golden hour light: Same garage, different day and view: More golden hour light and shadows: Morning breaking in the backyard:
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Where there’s fire, there’s the genius of Aretha
Magazine mashup of the April 2021 issue of National Geographic. More mashups here.
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Draw it, erase it
My wife found a kid-sized easel on post-Christmas super sale that’s whiteboard on one side and chalkboard on the other, and so far it’s been Mr. Almost 3’s go-to activity. Fortuitously, and perhaps relatedly, his drawing skills have evolved just enough to be able to depict some basic body-like shapes and eyes: Though they look…
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The long and winding genius of the Pauls (McCartney and Simon)
While trolling for something to read on Hoopla, I came upon Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon. It’s only available as an audiobook (or “audio biography”), and wisely so since so much of it depends on hearing Simon play his songs amidst his conversations with Gladwell. In that way it’s…
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Typewriters are better than Bitcoin
Last week I visited a Salvation Army I’d never tried before for some quick typewriter hunting. Between two late-period electric Smith Coronas I spotted a silver fiberglass case that screamed Olympia. And sure enough, I popped it open and beheld this 1959 SM3 (photo taken post-cleanup): The combo of gray body and brown keys was…
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Literacy as a religious act
From the remarkable book How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill: “Like the Jews before them, the Irish enshrined literacy as their central religious act. In a land where literacy had previously been unknown, in a world where the old literate civilizations were sinking fast beneath successive waves of barbarism, the white Gospel page,…
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Tales from a two year old
The following is a short story my almost-3 year old told me while we sat in bed resting between wrestling bouts. I dictated it into my phone as he told it to preserve for posterity: The gasoline pulled up to the ghost in the starry nighttime sky. The ghost pulled up to a very big…
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Gangsters for children
Magazine mashups from Entertainment Weekly, November 2019. More here.