My grandson is a water hound, and that fact plus his third birthday put us last weekend at one of those modern waterparks owned by a conglomerate on the New York Stock Exchange that features hair-raising water slides, wave pools, massive downpouring fountains and godawful unhealthy food at exorbitant prices. It’s a decidedly middle America, working class, family entertainment vibe, which today means plentiful diversity not only of ethnic groups but also body types and aesthetic sensibilities. Suffice to say no one would mistake it for the starting line at the Ironman Triathlon. Why is it, then, that the more…
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Was chatting with a coder friend recently about artificial intelligence (AI) and the persistent buzz that it will be replacing countless jobs in the future. Increasingly, those jobs will include the so-called “knowledge” jobs at which I made my living. College education in the humanities, learning how to read, research, think, evaluate and write? Bahhhhahaha! Better at this point to pick up a useful skill such as Certified Robot Assistant in an Amazon warehouse, where your main concern is troubleshooting any complications the robots encounter finding the items Jeff Bezos has promised his customers they’ll receive in a few nanoseconds.…
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There comes a time when every living thing begins to creak and leak. I include among those “living things” this very blog, which I—with considerable help from a few esteemed cohorts—breathed into being a bit more than 12 years ago, with a post on the novelist, essayist, and public intellectual Marilynne Robinson. A couple of years ago, the WordPress platform this blog uses informed me that its “theme,” the graphic design interface it sits on to convey the words and images here, would no longer be technically “supported.” That meant I would have to transition to a new theme, since…
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A hound bounds through the wet grass as I walk the park across from my house. It cuts sharply left, then right like a fleet NFL running back. Seeming to think momentarily of drawing even with its mistress running maybe 30 yards ahead with leash in hand, it instead brakes suddenly, with great force, and sets to turning in tight circles, one, two, three revolutions or more, a veritable dervish. Then it launches into a vertical jump, at the bottom of which it bursts forth into a mad sprint that overtakes its mistress at last. Onwards it goes, resuming its…
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Alright, enough, for the moment, of electoral tempests and distempers. The election and the world will be what they will be, chagrined, stupefied or elated as we ourselves may become in observing and then contending with them, as we must. But we need not do so in every waking moment. (Being at the mercy of our night dreams, of course, is another matter.) Whatever happens come Tuesday and its aftermath, we must also make time for music and dancing and loving, for joshing and jiving, for romping through woods and along shores, for piling into cars and buses, subways, trains…