Carmageddon?

July 20, 2011

“People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles,” or so famously begins Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero. This past weekend there was construction on a freeway in Los Angeles and for more than a month the media built up terror to the point where people were a) leaving town, b) planning to […]

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Love and the Tree of Life

July 13, 2011

Two friends separately wanted me to see The Tree of Life, partly so that we could talk about it.  I went and saw it with Will, my movie-buddy-kid.  Then Will and I talked all about it—and there is much to discuss, much ambiguity and beauty and disturbance and yearning and indulgence and brilliance and sadness […]

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Growing up as America

July 6, 2011

Here we are in July, two days after America’s 235th birthday.  Given that parenting requires us to consider issues such as autonomy, attachment, independence and development, perhaps it’s worth zooming out for a moment and considering our current state of development as a parenting zeitgeist and as a country. Like stars forming from dust and […]

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Panic in Piddle Park: Self and Self-Esteem

June 29, 2011

A recent Atlantic article by Lori Gottlieb, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy,” goes by a different hook on the magazine’s cover:  “How the Cult of Self-Esteem is Ruining our Kids.” It’s summer so I’ll keep it brief:  fear-driven pitches sell books and magazines but do little to help parents do better with children.  […]

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Eat, Poop, Be On Our Way: Diarrhea at Delphi

June 22, 2011

Maybe it was a bad piece of goat, in fact I’m pretty sure it was some bad goat… but who the hell eats goat in the first place?  Especially from some sketchy food cart on a filthy Athens side street.  But we were young and hungry and the tour-bus was about to depart on a […]

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Water

June 15, 2011

A recent post by Kristen over at Motherese, in which she mentioned the breaking of water, brought a vivid memory spilling back into the cove of working memory… “There’s water everywhere!” Andy breathlessly shouts into the pay-phone. I’m standing on Pico Boulevard with my finger in one ear, having pulled over after getting a 911 […]

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In Praise of Bad Ideas

June 8, 2011

A recent article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, “Creation Myth,” is ostensibly about how Steve Jobs walked into Xerox’s secret lab in 1979 (in exchange for giving Xerox a crate of Apple stock) and walked out with everything he needed to re-think cutting edge technology for use (and monetization) in the real world.  It […]

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Waiting for the End of the World… on the couch

June 1, 2011

We’ve made it well past May’s doomsday prognostications and mercifully into June.  Recent Rapturous predictions of the world’s end have, once again, proven to be greatly exaggerated.  So, now that we’ve dodged yet another kooky bullet, is there anything beyond mirth, snarkiness or the need to invent a new-new-Armageddon math to be learned from this […]

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Quantum Parenting

May 25, 2011

There was a recent piece in The New Yorker, “Dream Machine:  The mind-expanding world of quantum computing,” by Rivka Galchen in which she meets with David Deutsch who she dubs the founding father of quantum computing. Yet when it comes to quantum anything, I want to know not who’s my daddy, but rather who’s my […]

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Left Behind

May 18, 2011

I read an illuminating and provocative essay recently about how, and why, the No Child Left Behind Act has failed—and I thought it worth sharing in this space.  It happens to have been written by my older son, Nate Dolin, as a paper for his Junior year history class.  He became interested in this issue […]

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