When I heard the bad news about Adam Schlesinger yesterday, I was nearly wrecked by it. I know there’ll be much more horror and loss to come, and I need to steel myself, but it still shook me. I wasn’t ready. He was, as you’ve probably read, 52 years old. I’d expected many more wonderful […]
Category Archives: General News
About apophenia
On December 29, I took a long walk up to Journal Square with Hilary. We’d somehow made it through 2019, and I was eyeing the calendar warily. My fear was that something dangerous was coming, but I didn’t know what it was. Hilary felt, reasonably, that I was scaring us for no good reason, and […]
The fog thins, ever so slightly
It is now abundantly, frighteningly clear that the CCP cooked the books. Many more Chinese have gotten sick from the coronavirus and died than the government is willing to admit. We now know that it took Chinese authorities about three weeks to tell the World Health Organization about what was happening in Wuhan. We will […]
Last night I dreamed I touched my nose
Brett writes that confidence is half of immunity. I know he’s right. Shortly after her diagnosis — when we had limited knowledge of what we were facing — Hilary came into this room and announced that we were going to have to try to have fun. Every morning since then, I’ve woke with a plan […]
Scary hours
I have lived a long time. I would like to live longer, but I don’t want to be greedy about it. If a meteor was approaching the planet, zeroing in on New Jersey from some precinct of space, and there was no way to avoid it, I don’t think I’d panic. I’d have Hilary with […]
Opening day
In January, which feels like oh so long ago, our plane home from Miami was delayed for four hours. Surface winds in Newark, we were told. The literature at the airport gift shops concerned true crime or fake crime or in between crime, Girl Chopped Up or Girl Flung From The Train, or Pieces Of […]
Nobody in charge
By executive order, the governor of Mississippi overrides decisions made by Mississippi municipalities and orders people back to work. Later he amends this decision, and then amends his amendment. Rhode Island announces its intention to enforce the mandatory quarantine of New York visitors by going door to door and screening for Empire State license plates. […]
Noah Zark
In The Beginning Of Desire, a close reading of the Book of Genesis, Rabbi Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg interprets the Flood story as a metaphor for pregnancy and birth. Noah floats, silent and surrounded by symbols of generative potential, in an amniotic sea inside the womb of the ark. After a period of labor — forty […]
I can’t feel my face
Hand sanitizer reminds me of the worst days of chemotherapy. We’d never used it before. But we were taking the train back and forth to Sloan Kettering, and standing in crowds, trying our best to stay upright. We didn’t want to pick up any opportunistic infections. At the hospital, dispensers of Purell foam were everywhere. […]
The crack-up
Overlooked amidst the noise, but still significant: New Jersey and New York visitors to Florida must now go through a fourteen-day quarantine before entering the state. This decision was made by the governor of Florida, who has been criticized for his refusal to close the beaches. Yesterday’s order felt like a compensatory move — a […]