Sadly, my uncle lost his wife to cancer a few years ago, after something like 45 years of marriage. Since then, he’s had the good fortune to meet a new woman who now seems to be a permanent and supportive fixture in his life. But, what’s weird is that this new girlfriend was also once [...]

In the old days, the Earl would have gotten a floral script treatment at the very least. Nowadays, utilitarian Helvetica is all he can hope for. Mangrove lobbying dollars at work. These are not your father’s mangroves, no sir. These are altogether more dynamic mangroves, living on the edge. When I originally read this and [...]

There’s nothing quite like the ringing sense of disorientation and excitement experienced the first time you’re boarding a flight with your own child in tow and you hear the ‘Now boarding families with small children announcement’ and realize that this entitlement now applies to you. Yesterday, we returned home from our third transatlantic trip in [...]

The recent post about Microserfs and the early days of the internet got me thinking about another back-in-the-day cultural turning-point: the dawning of the Simpsons. The Simpsons era, of course, predates the internet. The show has been going on for so long that the original Christmas pilot episode aired when Ronald Reagan (!) was still [...]