I have a list of ideas for blog topics that I’ve collected over the last several months. Many of them have to do with politics. But as I sat down to draft today’s post, I found I had little appetite for pursuing any of the political topics on my list of ideas. Maybe that’s because my prime impetus for blogging about politics has been my indignation with the Trump presidency, and now that he’s on his way out, that motivation has diminished. Or maybe it’s because we’re in a kind of political limbo — Donald Trump has stopped even pretending to govern the country, and Joe Biden isn’t yet in office. . . .
Your Email Inbox Makes a Terrible To-Do List
One little-noted fact about email is that no one teaches you how to use it. Email started out as a speedy and convenient way of exchanging written messages without all the fuss of printing and mailing them. For many people, in their personal lives, that’s still what email is — albeit with a lot more unwanted messages to sort through than we used to get. But at the office, email has morphed into a mammoth, all-purpose system for coordinating virtually all knowledge work. Dealing with email consumes what seems to be an ever-increasing portion of our workday. And yet over the course of this transformation, almost no thought has been given to how this increasingly pervasive system should be used, and what the best practices are for managing the flood of emails that contemporary knowledge workers receive every day. . . .
Progressive Realism vs. Progressive Idealism in U.S. Foreign Policy
I subscribe to very few email newsletters, one of which is Robert Wright’s Nonzero Newsletter, one of the most thoughtful and persuasive political newsletters I’ve found. Wright’s essays are almost always longer than I feel I have the patience for, and yet I’m usually glad to have read them.
It was from reading Wright’s newsletter that I discovered that I’m a “progressive realist” when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. If you’re not familiar with that term, I encourage you to look at this article in which Wright defines it. . . .
Grammarly
For about three weeks now, I’ve been using an automated grammar and style checker called Grammarly. It’s similar to the grammar checker in Microsoft Word but with more robust capabilities. There’s a free version that checks grammar, spelling and punctuation, but since I write a blog post every day, I decided to try out the expanded “premium” version, which purports to also provide “clarity-focused sentence rewrites, tone adjustments, plagiarism detection, word choice, formality level, fluency, and additional advanced suggestions.” Now, each time I draft a blog post, I copy and paste the text into Grammarly and then look at each of the corrections and suggestions it offers. Perhaps one in ten of those is helpful. Many are just wrong. . . .
How Great is E-Z Pass?
I wrote yesterday about our friend Marilia’s going home to Brazil last week. One of the things she needed to handle was returning her E-Z Pass tag, and I volunteered to do that for her after she left. I’ll be putting it in the mail today.
That got me thinking about just how great E-Z Pass is. Remember when you had to sit in long lines at toll booths, breathing in exhaust fumes? On some trips it felt like you spent more time waiting to pay a toll than you did driving. Jennifer and I were relatively early adopters of E-Z Pass, so we often had the exhilarating experience of sailing through a toll both in the dedicated E-Z Pass lane while hundreds of other drivers waited to hand their money to a human attendant. It was our custom to chant “EE-ZEE PAAASSSSS!” as we cruised through. . . .
Marilia is Home
Our friend Marilia arrived home in the Brazilian city of Belém yesterday. She had been staying with us for most of the last six months and finished obtaining her doctorate in music while she was here. During the 12 years she’d been in the U.S., she’d accumulated a lot of stuff. She was able to send some things, including her piano and furniture, home by boat several weeks ago, but there was a weight limit on that shipment, so she spent the last few weeks sorting through her wardrobe and other possessions, deciding what she would take with her on the plane and what she would throw out or give away before she left. She also had to handle scads of administrative tasks, from obtaining an apostille for her diploma to returning her E-Z Pass tag. It was a head-spinning job, so I tapped my project-management experience to help her get on top of it . . .
Wonder Woman 1984 Disappoints
I loved the movie Wonder Woman when it came out three years ago and was expecting to like the sequel, which debuted Christmas Day on HBO Max. I wanted to like it. When I saw the headline of Manohla Dargis’s review in the New York Times, “She’s Still Big, It’s the Script That Got Small,” I refused to read it. I didn’t want Ms. Dargis planting negative perceptions in my head before I’d seen the film. . . .
Our Neighborhood Luminaria Display
My neighborhood has a yuletide tradition of putting out luminaria on Christmas Eve. Even if you haven’t done luminaria yourself, you’ve probably seen them. They consist of a white paper bag with some sand in the bottom and a thick candle stuck in the sand. When lit they emit an ethereal glow. I know people who place luminaria along their front walk or driveway when they have people over for a holiday get-together, but my neighborhood has for years put out hundreds of them, all at the same time. . . .
Merry Christmas
We weren’t going to get a Christmas tree this year, but then Jennifer decided we had to have something to put the gifts under, so she went out and got this Charlie Brown-worthy tree. . . .
Shimmer Lake
Writing yesterday about the movie Small Town Crime, which I had just seen the night before, reminded me of another movie about a crime in a small town and the efforts by law enforcement and other interested parties to solve it. This one I saw almost exactly a year ago on Netflix’s streaming service. I just checked and it’s still there. It’s called Shimmer Lake. . . .