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Sometimes, sometimes and always
Peli Grietzer is kind of thrillingly good on one of my very favorite poems, Ashbery’s “At North Farm”, especially the way that things done for the sake of some eschatological hope or fear end up sort...
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There are no new gags
Free idea for my philosopher friends: put out a call for papers for a volume about baseball and philosophy, called “What Is It Like To Be At Bat?” Amazon tells me that somebody has already produced a...
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Adam Smith on mathematicians and poets
I got this strange and interesting passage from Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments from Mark Lewko’s blog, which seems to be quiet at the moment but I hope it comes back! The beauty of poetry is a...
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Life, friends, was boring. xkcd says so.
From a recent xkcd: But kids, it’s not true! I was here before there was Internet, and I can tell you, people were not bored more often than they are now, and the boredom was not of a finer and more...
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Thoughts on TEDx
I gave a TED talk! OK, not exactly — I gave a TEDx talk, which is the locally organized, non-branded version, but same idea. 18 minutes or less, somewhat sloganistic, a flavor of self-improvement and...
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Poem for the ALDS
These are the names that are freaking me out, Verlander, Scherzer, and Price, Plaguing my Oriole fandom with doubt, Verlander, Scherzer and Price. A trio of felines, bringing the heat, Verlander,...
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Portuguese vs. Portuguese
The Portuguese edition of “How Not To Be Wrong” just arrived at my house. “Portuguese” as in “from Portugal” and as distinct from the Brazilian edition. Interesting how two versions of the book in...
View ArticlePandemic social life as villanelle
When I took creative writing in high school my idea of writing a poem was writing down some thoughts that felt expressive to me and organizing those thoughts into lines of various lengths. Our teacher...
View ArticleTo A Crackpot
I still have a lot of text files from when I was in college and even high school, sequentially copied from floppy to floppy to hard drive to hard drive over the decades. I used to write poems and they...
View ArticleThere’s only one thing that I know how to do well
Last week I moderated (virtually) a discussion at Stanford between my poetry friend Stephanie Burt and my category theory friend Emily Riehl, on the topic of “identity” — specifically the question of...
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