Seeing Women
These two portraits are of the same woman. Her name was Helen Brooke Taussig, and she was a famed cardiologist who did ground-breaking work in pediatric cardiac surgery. So which one do you think has...
View ArticleDoris Lessing, Uncovered
There was something unsatisfactory about the New York Times’ front-page obit for Nobel literature laureate Doris Lessing, at least for me. So I went back to the archives to look for the magazine piece...
View ArticleA Picasso for Jezebel
The come-on, in a brief item in the New York Times arts section: “A Picasso for $135? There’s a Chance.” Yeah, sure. I would have ignored the headline except that it ran under a photo of a run-down...
View ArticleAn Extraordinary Submergence
I don’t remember ordering J.M.Ledgard’s novel Submergence from the library. I do remember getting the email that it had arrived, and wondering what it was. Then picking it up a couple of days later,...
View ArticlePure Zen
My copy of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard bears the marks of a well-used life, much like the photo of him in today’s New York Times. The cover is torn and tattered, the linen boards worn and...
View ArticleWho Said It?
“Isn’t there a convention that if you don’t know the author of a quote, you can always attribute it to Churchill?” one character asks another in Zia Haider Rahman’s novel ‘In The Light of What We...
View ArticleLightning Louie
It’s weird how a single scene from a movie can stay with you. Like this piece of American noir: A fedora-hatted gumshoe walks into a Chinese eatery. He heads for the back booth where an over-sized guy...
View ArticleWindhovering
I slow down for falcons. Falcons, eagles, hawks, cranes, herons, kestrels, all manner of large birds. If I’m on the road, I pull over, stop the car, get out, and allow myself to be entranced. If I’m...
View ArticleInfinity Comix!
Here’s a great two-page record of my infinity talk at the Goodship Academy of Higher Education the other night, and the discussion that followed. It was made by artist Jed Dunkerley, whose...
View ArticleOn The Wall
I love this photo. My friend the art critic and Pulitzer finalist Jen Graves (yes, I’m boasting) took it last month at a preview of an exhibit at Seattle’s Frye Museum of Art. That’s me up there on...
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