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Recent Articles

• DeLillo’s Great Jones Street Then and Now
  October 29, 2024
  When I opened up Great Jones Street, the 1973 novel by then barely known Don DeLillo, my first thought was, “This is going to be dated.” Naturally I was wrong.  Suffused with the gritty, absurdist ethos and aesthetics of punk rock combined with a noir-esque approach to dialogue and story development, DeLillo feels ahead of his time, not behind, and in a strange way, almost timeless.  The novel is the story of a rock star named Bucky Wunderlick, who one day walks out of his life as an international phenom and goes to live in a grubby apartment on Great Jones Street⁠1 in the East Village of New York City.  The reasons for this dereliction of duty are vague at first, but it seems to have something to do with fame. “Fame requires every kind of excess,”  Wunderlick tells us in the opening sentence.   [Read more]
• Unscheduled Bliss
  August 19, 2024
  I had just gotten dressed and was preparing to go downstairs for toast and coffee when the power went out.  [Read more]
• Memos to Self
  July 25, 2024
  Recently, I cleared out my pockets for pieces of paper scribbled on by me, and sorted through them with the intention of removing intellectual clutter from my life.  What was so important, I wondered, about these thoughts, that I wrote them down and carried them around, possibly for weeks, even after I could no longer remember what any of them were.  So I pulled them out and read them — a mixed bag of random pensées*, of no particular importance except perhaps to record what I was thinking about in the month of June 2024.   [Read more]
• Can’t We Just Get Along? A Lesson the Past
  July 17, 2024
  One of the more fascinating personages of times past was Henry of Navarre, a ne'er-do-well and free thinker who became king of the French during the religious wars of the 1500s.  It was right after the Reformation, and society was rather tense, as seemed always to be the case when religious reformation broke out. The Protestants hated the Catholics. The Catholics hated the Protestants.  This was nothing new, but in France, the hatred was so intense that people killed each other by the thousands for over 30 years. [Read more]
• STEM and Real Life Kids, or, Can You Legislate STEM Aptitude?
  May 21, 2024
  We modern Americans believe that anything we can say can be so.  In other words, if we can think of something, we can make it happen. But is this always true? Of course not, else I wouldn't be writing this sentence. Just because you want something to happen and try really hard to make it happen, doesn't mean it's going to happen.  A case in point is legislating STEM in education -- the hyper emphasis on the information modalities of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We think we can make more of this if we just teach it hard enough to enough children. [Read more]