About A Boy
Don’t worry, be happy
I was busy sitting around at home waiting for a Zoom call on toothpaste slogans when the text buzzed in. [...]
The worst of times
I was always a fan of 20th-century guidebooks, the vast Baedeker series among my favorites. This love began in my [...]
Workout mat’s therapy session
The conversation begins this way, more or less predictably: “And how does that make you feel?” “Well, obviously not good.” [...]
On Pope Francis and war
In most of the West, Pope Francis I is facing furious media and public indignation for his unwillingness to openly [...]
Goodbye, Don Matteo
For the last few days, my ears have been buzzing with a snippet of elevator-style synthesizer music. It’s short and [...]
The garlic
Muchness, the rabbit who lives in my room, is not even three pounds — but he lives oblivious to maxims [...]
When hype mars history
When it comes to exaggeration and hyperbole, the Russia-Ukraine conflict has only moved an emotional world further from critical thinking, writes John Freidlander.
Unequal compassion
My friend Barbara is exceptional in so many ways I can hardly keep track of them. She and her husband [...]
The art of teaching
I never thought that I would end up teaching, certainly not based on my halting early efforts. The summer after [...]
La poubelle agréée
My last task of the day is to carry out the garbage bin or, as the French call it in [...]
Film: “The Man in the Hat”
The poet W.B. Yeats wrote, “Your beauty can but leave among us vague memories, nothing but memories.” What appears as [...]
The Ukraine sandlot
A bully with outsized delusions of long-gone glory invades his now independent but one-time fiefdom to the south because it [...]