The term “perpetual student,” as seen on the tagline of my website, has gained cultural currency just at the point when it no longer seems to apply to me. One mother laughingly called herself a “perpetual student.” She meant she pursued learning for the sheer joy of inquiry. But the term is usually one of …
Category Archives: Memoir
Bus Girl
Some people have a knack for chatting people up, turning on the charm, getting phone numbers. Me, I’m an introvert. If I’m on a bus or airplane or a train, I’ll be listening to music while reading a book or a newspaper. But sometimes you just have to take off the headphones. She was an …
Memoir, 9/11, and the Literature of Technology and Political Violence: A conversation with ChatGPT
Tell a story about a man riding the bus from New Jersey to New York, in the style of a KGB report The subject, identified as John Smith, boarded the bus in New Jersey at approximately 8:00am on the morning of January 12th, 2023. He was observed to be carrying a black backpack and wearing …
The Siren Song of the MBA
I was in debt, living with my parents in New Jersey, and I needed a job. In the help-wanted section, I saw that the NYC Department of Corrections was hiring a Statistician. To be working for the city, that’s not bad. In an office, I would think. I had taken some advanced statistics, knew enough …
The 5 Whys
Doshite nihongo o benkyo-saretan desu ka? どうして日本語を勉強されたのですか。 Why are you studying Japanese? It all started in 1995 with a lightly used copy of Japanese for Busy People and a Kanji workbook, gifts from a good friend who had briefly attempted, and then abandoned, the project of learning Japanese. I became fascinated by the dual syllabaries, …
How to Get Ahead in Advertising
Competitrack had racks of VHS machines set up to record the top broadcast and cable channels in dozens of US cities. Someone would swap in new tapes and box up the old ones for shipment to New York. The team of TV “coders” would receive the tapes and scan through each one to find and …
Millionaire
At 25, I didn’t realize how wealthy I was, or how free. I had a good job and no debt, living in Manhattan at the beginning of a tech boom. My hometown banker told me I had over $6,000 in cash. “What do you want to do with it?”“Well, I may need that money next …
IVAN: A HALF-LIFE
Over the last two months, I’ve written over 40 blog posts. A good start, but it’s time for a pivot. The original idea was 40 chapters, one series of blog posts corresponding to each of the Open Yale Courses, drawing on journals and unpublished manuscripts from the past nine years. But I’m going to press …