I have reported on other favorites (here and here), but my favorite author is Ann Patchett. I’ve read all of her novels and her books of essays. When I see them, I devour her columns in the Wall Street Journal. I love everything she has written. My favorite of her novels was her first one […]
Leaving Your Kid at College
I was asked to give some remarks to the incoming freshmen and their parents this week. Here’s what I said. (I changed the name of my son’s friend to protect her well-meaning mother). Good morning and welcome. On behalf of the faculty, I welcome all of you to our Leeds family. One of the reasons […]
Scenes from the Swimming Pool Bleachers
My sons were summer league swimmers, and my younger son also swam on his high school team. For fifteen years, I mostly shirked my swim-mom duties and let swim-dad own those responsibilities. You spend three to eight hours in the bleachers to see your child swim for a few minutes. That calculation might sound unmotherly […]
My Favorite Novel: The Namesake
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri is my favorite novel. Gogol (Nikhil) is the main character. It is his name that the title references, and the book follows his life. I find him absolutely fascinating. He goes through life with a certain level of dissatisfaction with everything, a combination of self-loathing and other-loathing. His heritage makes […]
Playing Lemur
A rogue lemur has been in the local news. It’s rare to see lemurs in the news in Colorado. Not so in North Carolina, where we lived when our boys were little. Durham, North Carolina is home to the Duke Lemur Center. The world’s most famous lemur lived there. That rockstar lemur was Zoboomafoo, the […]
Van College
We have a 1998 Dodge Grand Caravan. It has a cassette player. Like some of us around here, it is showing its age. It did get a new battery this year, and we figured that would be the van’s last battery. Still, one day this week, the van wouldn’t start. The van feels like a […]
Jonah Lehrer’s Immodest Proposal for College
In my office, I have some newspaper clippings taped to the wall. One of them has been there a few years, a column by Jonah Lehrer in The Wall Street Journal called “Taking Knowledge Out of College” (2012). Lehrer cites an argument by economist Bryan Caplan that “colleges are more about certifying their students than […]
The Marguerite
This is a true story. It happened twenty years ago, but this is how I remember it. I was a graduate student at Stanford. We lived in student housing on campus. Jim was teaching at Burlingame High School. He usually took the CalTrain to work instead of fighting the traffic on the 101. We had […]
Thick Skin
“Listen,” you say, and you pause, like, “I’m trying to figure out how to phrase this.” That’s when I pull out the thick skin, the kind women always keep tied around their waists like an extra flannel shirt, ready to throw on before meetings or rape trials, or walking down the street, or making small-talk […]
Silly Happy
This is a picture of me and my sister. I’m on the left. I am VERY happy. Maybe you can tell from the picture, or maybe it just looks like a garden-variety happy kid picture. Not garden-variety at all. Finger puppets, people. I’m not so sure about my sister. She doesn’t seem unhappy to me, […]