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The cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—CBS insists it was purely a “financial decision,” the result of declining ad revenue in late night television. Others see it as a different kind of “financial decision,” a decision by Paramount (the parent company of CBS) to sacrifice Colbert so that the American president won’t cancel […]
It’s tempting, in telling the story of the Edith Farnsworth House, to break out clichés like “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” For the residence in question is made predominantly of glass, or rather glass and steel, and its first owner turned out to have more than a few stones for its […]
With the Halloween season mere months away, the time has come to start thinking about what frightening reads to line up for ourselves this year. Some of us may reach for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a story we all think we know. But a look into its context reveals that what’s now […]
Frank Zappa called them the “Mothers of Prevention,” the group of wives married to members of Congress who decided in the mid-80s to go to war against rock lyrics and whip up some good ol’ conservative hysteria. We’ve talked about this time before on this site, especially as Zappa himself testified in front of Congress […]
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Is it okay to dress your cat in a ridiculous costume? What about giving a poodle a haircut that subjects him to ridicule? The cat and the dog probably don’t know or care, but we think less of their person if it happens. At Disney, the costumed characters need security guards. Kids (and more often) […]
It’s easy to imagine that we should do our work and then, when it doesn’t work as we hope, improvise to fix it. But perhaps our work is to show up ready and willing to deal with a future we didn’t expect. I keep writing about it because we all need to keep thinking about […]
With the Halloween season mere months away, the time has come to start thinking about what frightening reads to line up for ourselves this year. Some of us may reach for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a story we all think we know. But a look into its context reveals that what’s now […]
A useful metaphor from juggling: When you find yourself lunging for a ball or club, let it drop. Lunging will always lead to a drop sooner or later, and it pays to skip the lunge and simply begin again, on better terms.
