” … New York / Where I am now; which is a logarithm / Of other cities. Our landscape / Is alive with filiations, shuttlings; / Business is carried on by look, gesture / Hearsay …” From “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” John Ashbery, 1974 In the early 1970s, Read more…
It’s become a trend to describe extreme, off-putting positions taken by Republicans as “weird.” Thank you to Democratic Minnesota Governor and now Vice Presidential Candidate Tim Walz, who as you can hear on this podcast got the trend started. I’d like to add “ick” to “weird.” There’s something truly unwholesome Read more…
I’ve decided to describe my recent trip to Vancouver, British Columbia in the context of four one-sentence notes I wrote on my phone while I was there. But I also want to make the upfront statement that I loved Vancouver when I last visited there as a teenager, and I Read more…
Over the past few months I’ve let go of two practices that allowed me to make regular progress on this blog. One letting go was very conscious—I want to get Love Economy, my first novel, through the difficult birthing process. This hasn’t happened yet, but 2024 is still young! Another Read more…
Predictably, I got around to watching Hulu’s The Bear right before it piled up a stack of Emmys. I’m still a season behind, but I want to begin this post by saying that Season 1 Episode 7 is brilliant and unique. You should see it if you haven’t already. No Read more…
A “Baker’s Dozen” Reforms for Teaching and Parenting This year my second and youngest child heads to college. 2023 also marks two decades since I moved to Sacramento from New York City, a decision that precipitated, domino-like, a series of other choices that led me from a career focused on Read more…
There are a lot of beautiful things about Mexico, and a lot of hard ones. But if there is one single thing that keeps me coming back it may be the clever urban design and intense sense of public culture. I speak fluent though accented Spanish, which over the years Read more…
Prosperity has many potential definitions. But if we read the concept broadly, as a state of happiness and contentment and not merely as the economic accumulation of things and experiences, then other kinds of ideas and policy concerns might boil to the surface. I feel I need to say this Read more…
Maybe TS Eliot was right that April is the cruelest month. But here in California March was relentless. Atmospheric river after river doused hopes that the dark and cold might end. Even my third spring break sojourn to Los Angeles yielded downpour instead of sunshine, block-long puddles splashing down La Read more…
February turns out to have been a good month to muse about housing. For instance, this opinion article by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic got me going on the question of whether lack of housing might truly, as Lowrey proposes, be the root cause behind the decisions of San Francisco Read more…