My grandmother, Courtney Coolidge, died yesterday.  Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish poet and Nobel laureat, died the day before.  In grieving I find it appropriate to link the unrelated, as death will...

I've been learning to reinhabit my room in my parents' house, having come here to spend Thanksgiving together for the first time in seven years.  Coming back to the room you've grown up in is always...

There are times when I wonder if I have some mild form of manic depression, because intensely creative days can be followed closely by days in which it's something of a struggle to remember that being...

Passover 2011 has arrived, and with it comes the (now) yearly need to consider how the ideas of enslavement and liberation apply to my life.  Over the last few months I've been drawn to an increasingly...

In order to respond to a friend's query about the potential for hatching quails, I was compelled to research the ornithological distance between quails and partridges (presuming a relevant pop culture...

I am not so jazzed right now.  It may be because I've just gotten over the flu - there's nothing like being sick to make you feel truly pathetic - or it may be due to the fact that I really do have...

The three things I would rather be doing right now than revising the hypothesis section of my thesis: 1. Working on my sister's birthday present (oooohh, mysterious!) 2. Reading Dune (i.e., cramming...

Being in grad school has been one of the biggest motivations for being crafty.  There's much more tangible joy in having made something that one can experience through the senses than in something that...