“It took about a second for me to realize I had made the biggest mistake of my life. There was a perceptible shift in the energy of the room, a subtle change in Terry Crews’ affect and expression. Like an arthritic sensing impending rain, I simply knew. I’d gambled a small fortune on a hunch.”
Tag: reading
The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman
“By all accounts, Marilyn vos Savant was a child prodigy. Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1946, the young savant quickly developed an aptitude for math and science.”
Frank O’Hara’s “Ode: Salute to the French Negro Poets”
“Aimé Césaire, 1913-2008 It’s entirely likely that Frank O’Hara found the story* of Picasso’s telling Max Jacob “There is no style” in Yale French Studies No. 21, an issue titled “Poetry since the Liberation,” and dated “Spring-Summer 1958.” Therein, L. C.”
Tasmanian Devil
“David Walsh first made global headlines in 2009, when he gambled on the life of Christian Boltanski, a French artist whose installations often focus on death.”
(From the excellent New Yorker article)
Read More
While you’re here, check out some more writing.
- Here’s my 2018: In Review — full of ‘best of’ pics from the year as well as travel and writing
- Here’s my essay on the fantastic Elif Shafak piece ‘Why The Novel Matters In The Age Of Anger’
Lastly, check out my book — The 9 to 5 Nomad: A Modern Guide For The Location-Independent Employee (full website)
One Man’s Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical Mistake
“On a Friday in July 2012, two employees of the Wikimedia Foundation gave a talk at Wikimania, their organization’s annual conference.”
Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing
“You hear a lot nowadays about the magic of big data. Getting hold of the right numbers can increase revenue, improve decision-making, or help you find a mate—or so the thinking goes. In 2009, U.S.”
53 Historians Weigh In on Barack Obama’s Legacy
““It’s a fool’s errand you’re involved in,” warned Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Gordon Wood when approached recently by this magazine to predict Barack Obama’s historical legacy. “We live in a fog, and historians decades from now will tell their society what was happening in 2014.”
What the Web Said Yesterday
“Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 took off from Amsterdam at 10:31 A.M. G.M.T. on July 17, 2014, for a twelve-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur. Not much more than three hours later, the plane, a Boeing 777, crashed in a field outside Donetsk, Ukraine.”
What’s So Bad About Gluten?
“Just after Labor Day, the Gluten and Allergen Free Expo stopped for a weekend at the Meadowlands Exposition Center. Each year, the event wends its way across the country like a travelling medicine show, billing itself as the largest display of gluten-free products in the United States.”
Teenage Wastelands
“It took me seven years of marriage to figure out that my wife is a hardcore Pearl Jam fan. I knew she had some of their albums stashed in our iTunes library, but I didn’t realize she had all of them. I figured they were records from her youth, a band she no longer listened to, but I was wrong.”
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