There’s a conversation going on over at metafilter about how people cook and eat in this country. Like having a short commute, the ability to eat well is a privilege. It’s not just about having the money and access to purchase fresh produce and other healthy ingredients, it’s also about having the time to cook [...]
I took the overnight train last night from DC, where I was visiting my family, back to Boston. There were three distinct phases of the trip. The train was sold out for DC-NYC leg. My seatmate, who shared her stash of old Bewitched episodes with me, got out with 3/4 of the train at 2:30 [...]
The other day I was talking with one of my housemates about putting shelves up on the wall outside my room. Now, I had a totally underhanded reason for wanting shelves there – I want the challenge of building them and putting them up. But her arguments were equally out of left field to me: [...]
I’ve been tutoring a friend of a friend in Matlab, and we spent a good hour this afternoon chasing down a bug in his program. He asked how I can stand it, the constant trouble-shooting spiced up by the occasional epic search for a minor flaw*. “Doesn’t it drive you crazy?” he asked. And no, [...]
There’s a provocative short story by Ursula Le Guin called The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. You can read it online here, and I suggest you do so before going on, because I’m about to spoil it completely. The story has a simple and unoriginal conceit – that there is a city of general [...]
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