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An Ode to Cable

Oh cable, I could not part with you! I came close, though. You know how it works: you negotiate a one-year deal, and then when the special rate eventually expires, some even-more-obscene amount quietly drains from your bank account. That’s your cue to get on…
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January 25, 2014
cultural commentarypop culture

Little Obsessions

I have endured some condescending eyerolling this week, aimed my way because I showed moderate interest in the birth of the royal baby. The two men with whom I live (one husband, one teenage son) took the line “Babies are born every day. Big deal.”…
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July 27, 2013
cultural commentary

Quintessence of Dust

Last night, thanks to the cleverness and curiosity of internet geeks, my husband and I were able to listen for about three hours to Boston police scanners—live-streamed over the internet—during the operation that captured the Boston bombing suspect. We knew, before it was broadcast on…
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April 20, 2013
cultural commentarypolitics

Doomed To Be a Taker

I really must apologize to the whole of society, since evidently I am a “taker.” I am a leech, a parasite, a moocher. This was certainly not my intention, but I missed some sort of memo and now I find myself in a category of…
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January 26, 2013
cultural commentary

Star of Wonder

The result of this for Chesterton was to see the whole world as astonishing, exactly because it might have been otherwise. Trees might have grown “tigers by the tail” instead of leaves. Eventually he gets to the idea that Someone made these choices about the…
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December 15, 2012
cultural commentary

Get Off My Lawn, Thou Knave

By an odd coincidence, the late William Hazlitt has been haunting my steps this week. The old gent showed up by previous arrangement in my creative nonfiction class, as the syllabus called for my students to read his essay titled “On the Pleasure of Hating.”
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October 6, 2012