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Letters to young people: Ents

Student who failed class asks for recommendations of what to do next time. Response: [Kid], You got a 67.7% on your midterm. You got a 58% on your … paper. You got a 72.5% on your … project. With generous adjustment (which everyone in the class got), you got only 27% on your final. You […]

Healing

Yesterday my community lost a brilliant light, Aaron Swartz, who did a great deal, in very few years and very young, to better the Internet and the information we have to understand it and the rest of our world. I met Aaron for the second time last year, and had been looking forward to future […]

Goodbye to Facebook?

Facebook, dammit, I wish I could quit you. I need to quit you. When Facebook played fast and loose with my privacy settings, I stayed. My friends kept track of how to fix them, and I’m pretty good at keeping on top of such things myself. When it got more and more obvious that Facebook’s […]

G. E. B. Kivistik

I shouldn’t even be doing this — I OUGHT to be working on the Nyan Cat project I had a flash of inspiration for the other day, a project with the potential to be FAR more enriching to the lives of those around me, and, dare I say, to the world. But another flash just […]

Protests, Revisited

Jury duty has put me down around City Hall for a few weeks, meaning I’m closer than I’d ordinarily be to the occupation on Wall Street. I’ve wandered by a few times after we’re let out at 5. Today I spent more time there, trying to figure out how I could possibly be useful. Useful, […]

I’m sorry, San Francisco, I couldn’t help it

(Lyrics. Something about hanging out with the musical side of my family brings ’em on. Deeply infused with Paul Simon, who I always associate with trips to the Bay Area, hills, and fog due to a couple of early family trips listening to a tape of his stuff Robert made for us.)

On Bicycles

I just wrote up the following for my online dating profile, on a site which seems to be awash with fixie-riding hipsters. Cute boys, but unfortunately bicycle-obsessed. Many of you good-lookin’, smart, down-for-the-cause gentlemen appear to be into bicycling. I generally click through a cute picture and skim down a well-written, funny profile indicating how […]

Hello, Hello

There’s something about viewing the full life of an artist that’s comforting. Clay didn’t get a full, long trajectory of his own, and it feels like a horrible cosmic mistake. But he’d played a prodigious number of songs for a kid his age.

Someone Else’s Neuroses

Everything in my room was covered with a white, chalky, spotty film of what I can only think of as poison. It was on my accordion case, my alarm clock, my shoes. The floor was covered with dried puddles of varnish, poison, and dead bug bodies, which when handled indelicately would leave blackish-red smears of gore on the pale flooring. Bed bug freaking Vietnam.

Blank Textbooks

The textbook marketing and development process is rather like watching sausage get made. It’s an awareness that diminishes appetites.