This is Bonnie, our next-door neighbor’s dog. We’re taking care of her for a few days while our neighbors are traveling.
We have a dog of our own, Riley, and having Bonnie here provides a study in contrasts. While Riley will ignore food in his bowl for hours at a time, Bonnie may be the most food-motivated dog I’ve ever known . . .
“He’s walking!” That was my wife on seeing the little boy up the block, toddling along next to his mother, one of her fingertips firmly in his grip. The last time we’d seen him, before the shutdown, he’d been in a stroller. The occasion was an informal neighborhood promenade . . .
Son of a gun! I sat down to write about a pet peeve of mine: Typing the name of a book and its author into the search field on Amazon.com and getting a list of results in which the book I’m looking for is not at the top. What I’ve often gotten instead are a…
I just finished reading The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can’t Do, by Edward Tenner. It wasn’t a compelling book. I struggled with what I might say about it and was tempted not to bother, but finally decided that since I’d spent hours reading it, I wanted to at least get a blog post out…
My wife Jennifer has a singular commitment to community. I realized this early in our relationship when I discovered that she’s the kind of person who would volunteer to drive a neighbor to the airport. Today we live in an unusually neighborly neighborhood. There’s a homeowners’ association that organizes well-attended social events throughout the year,…
I’ve often remarked how fortunate we are that the coronavirus epidemic started getting bad just as the weather was getting good. . . . The shutdown would have been doubly miserable if the sense of isolation had been compounded by cabin fever and Seasonal Affective Disorder . . . But now I can’t help but think forward to the late fall . . .
I have email subscriptions to only a small number of blogs and newsletters, but one that I read faithfully is Cal Newport’s. As a graduate student Newport started a blog called Study Hacks in which he offered advice to students on how to succeed in school. The scope of the blog has since expanded beyond advising students. Today it offers insights to anyone interested in performing “productive, valuable and meaningful work in an increasingly distracted digital age.” . . .
In a previous post, I shared my favorite conversation starter: “So what’s making your life interesting these days?” Today I came across a New York Times interview with Terry Gross in which she shares tips for having better conversations . . .
This week I started reading John Dickerson’s new book, The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency. I’m enjoying it. One of the insights Dickerson offers early in the book is that Dwight D. Eisenhower was what we would today call a life hacker. “He thought about not just what he did but how he did it,” Dickerson writes, “and developed systems to make himself more efficient.” . . .
I just finished reading a new book by Chris Wallace and Mitch Weiss called Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the Atomic Bomb and the 116 Days That Changed the World. I was drawn to it because last year I read Nigel Hamilton’s FDR at War series, a three-volume history of Roosevelt’s conduct of WWII as Commander in Chief. That series ends with the death of FDR, but the war continued for another four months, and I thought Countdown 1945 would be a way of following it through to its conclusion. It was that and more . . .