Recently I noticed that I first “met” with all of the following BESTs at age 14 or 15 years: The most beautiful piece of music I’ve ever played: Pavel Chesnokov‘s “Salvation Is Created” (high-school summer camp concert band, I played bassoon) The most beautiful piece of music I’ve ever sung: Gregorio Allegri‘s “Miserere mei” (church
My daughter discovered Disney princesses around age 3. I had known to expect this. I read Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter a year in advance. My daughter eased us into princesses: she went through an intense Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles phase 6 months earlier. (I told her recently how an insect or crab is
If this is not the only post you read this year comparing Beatrix Potter‘s books to Sex in the City, please share your blogroll with the rest of the group. Why is fiction always about people and relationships? I started thinking and talking about this question a few years ago. (I labeled it a “personal-intellectual
So who’s seen Ender’s Game? Is it any good as a movie? Unrelated question: which, if any, parts of the feel & experience of the book does it get right? It’s funny, isn’t it, that those are unrelated questions? And movie reviews can only answer the second question when it’s obvious that the reviewer is
One of the great parts of being a speculative fiction fan is watching reality catch up to and surpass one’s favorite authors’ imaginations — or just never take a step in that direction at all. As I’ve written before, I live in dread of the genetic-discrimination world of Gattaca, which I now fear may be
Rolling Jubilee is about to kick off, billing itself as “a bailout of the people, by the people, for the people.” Other comments I’ve seen on this: Political Mojo post Nov 9 Slate Moneybox post Nov 9 Making Light post Nov 12 I like the idea, in some ways especially the “random acts of kindness”
A shout-out to HRSFAN Aaron J. Dinkin, linguist of the dialectological variety, who appeared as a Major Quoted Someone for Slate last month in an article on the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS aka NCS). The article is raising awareness of some recent (~our lifetime) re-jiggering of “linguistic turf” for short vowels (cat, cot, caught,
I owe Elisabeth a massive apology for some poorly considered writing of mine last winter. I’m really sorry: it was thoughtless of me not to ask you directly first. A standard apology probably would have sufficed had I given it when it came due, but that was seven months ago. And culpability, like Rumour, grows
Oh, my. I no longer believe I die before Gattaca. This is frightening. The NYTimes article where I encountered this news has estimates from the study team that the technology could be available in as little as 3-5 years: whole-genome sequencing of a fetus based on only a maternal blood sample and a paternal saliva
OK, so now I’ve had two humanities people tell me more or less categorically that non-fiction reading is not pleasure reading. (The first instance prompted much of what I’ve written here in the past year and a half; the second came initially as a comment on this weblog.) I would not have expected that particularly
