It was dark in my old home town and I’d just run over a curb. I was piloting the Nissan Rogue Sport SUV I’d rented earlier in the day, driving through Ambler, Pennsylvania, a half-mile from where I went to high school and 400 miles from where I live now. You know how, when you…
We recently decided to use the good silver every day. It feels great. Years ago, my wife received monogrammed silver flatware from her mother, who is now sadly gone. (Her mother had had her own silver, which was stolen; she used the insurance money to replace it with silver monogrammed with her daughters’ initials.) For…
My high school and college years were crammed with full frontal nerdity . . . in contrast to the suave, successful authorial persona I now exude. Here’s a sampling. As you’ll see, my late, dearly loved friend Josh Friedman was a frequent partner in this unabashed nerdity, and my brother (now a math professor) was…
Books are great individually. But in big bunches, they’re not as sacred as they once were. I’m in the process of moving and I have a lot of books. I’ve been collecting science fiction books since I was a teenager — I’ve accumulated hundreds of hardbacks and hundreds more in paperback, with special bookcases to…
I tested positive for COVID-19 yesterday. So far, I’m fine. Here are some thoughts on that experience for you. How I got the virus I don’t know how I got the virus. My family and I are all fully vaccinated, having completed our vaccine doses months ago. My family has limited our outside contacts. Over…
My wife and I are preparing the house we’re selling for buyers and an open house in a month or so. We fell in love with the house almost immediately. It’s on a beautiful piece of ground in a nice part of our town. It’s big but 100 years old, with personality. It has four…
A shared enemy can connect people in amazing and ironic ways. There was once a man — let’s call him Ernest. Ernest was troubled. Much of the time, Ernest seemed like a typical suburban neighbor, keeping mostly to himself. But Ernest had a major problem with alcohol. When Ernest had been drinking, he terrorized the…
Is a Tesla safer with autopilot? That’s a challenging question to answer, because it’s not just about statistics — it’s about human psychology. According to Tesla’s statistics for Q1 of 2021, for every mile driven with a Tesla on Autopilot, you’re half as likely to have an accident as without the autopilot feature. Here’s the…
Things tend to go on as they always have — until somebody has an epiphany. A decade ago, I was the lead on hiring a new social media analyst at Forrester Research. A woman with a strong and positive social media presence interviewed with us, and got to the final stages, which included doing a…