Shut Up, I'm Reading
I remember the first time I held a crayon. The color (blue) and the iconic Crayola wrapper fixed themselves in my memory. But that memory was only retrieved, twenty-plus years later, when my two-year-old son fisted his first crayon.Crayons gave way, under first-grade teacher’s orders, to pencils and then, in third grade, a pen holder with its nib poised over an inkwell sunk in the corner of my school desk, the requisite yellow chamois somewhere at the mop-up ready.
Love That Has No Name
My child — the child within me — loves dinosaurs, dragons, and robots. Today, nowadays, robots are the winners. Jurassic Park dinosaurs are for adventures on a razor edge and the adventure ends there. Dragons are for renting out powers like flying, fire-breath, and gentle menacing but then you have to cage them and get back to the everyday.Robots, keen and smart and enigmatic, are for pairing up with these mentally immaculate beings, geniuses with talents to invent and deploy all kinds of wondrous things without showing ego or affect
Machines Like Us
Every era, every generation seems to have its horrors. But none of them, past or present, equate. We are in a particularly rough patch: right-wind attitudes are moving to the forefront and the planet seems to be readying for death by human hands.