Tag Archives: Stories
Another Halloween
It's that time of year again, when our culture takes a holiday originating in fall harvest and the passing of generations, and turns it into a celebration of imagination, childhood, community, misrule, aggression, terror, & trauma (as well as another opportunity for a capitalist binge).
Posted in Reading Around | Also tagged Barack Obama, David Bordwell, Fear, Halloween, Holidays, John McCain, Politics, Zombies | Leave a comment
What’s on Your Plate? or, How to Visit Your Food
One of the things that has blessed us in our time in this part of Wisconsin has been the chance to live close to our food. It's not that we sat farther from our plates in the city where I grew up, of course; it's that we sat further away from the land that was our food's native home.
Posted in Reading Around | Also tagged Aldo Leopold, Ann Vileisis, Blanchardville, Catherine Gund, Circle M Farm, Cities, Food, Movies, Rick Sanger, Seasons, Thomas A. Lyson, Troy Community Farm, Wisconsin | Leave a comment
My Kind of Expert
"The very idea that there is no truth, but only the filter of narrative through which truth is invented is something I learned at the feet of the most leftist professors at Yale and am learning again from Sarah Palin during the Vice Presidential debate, and I find that very disorienting."
Posted in Margin Notes, Mind & Society | Also tagged Experts, Humor, John Hodgman, Literary Criticism, Onion, Politics, Sarah Palin, Truth, Yale University | Leave a comment
Teach Them to Read and Let Them Go!
Having conventional life stages mapped out is comforting--we know what we are supposed do and when; but what if life doesn't always fit in a box? Or what if, as recent developmental research implies, there is no box?
Posted in Mind & Society, Reading Around | Also tagged Daniel T. Willingham, Deschooling, High School, Homeschool, Jean Piaget, Life Without School, Multi-Scale, Parenting, Psychology, Shakespeare, Unschooling | 6 Comments
August, 1945
Sixty-three years ago this week, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The enormity of the event, the inhuman scale of both this power and its consequences, is nearly impossible to communicate. How can one understand the power of a thousand suns unleashed upon whole cities? It became one of the defining stories for generations [...]
Posted in Continuing Stories, Mind & Society, Reading Around, Science & Technology | Also tagged Books, Ellen Klages, Engineering, Girls, Hiroshima, History, Holidays, Keiji Nakazawa, Los Alamos, Math, Nagasaki, Reviews, Trinity, War & Peace | Leave a comment
The Heart of Father’s Day
Fathers are parents as well; we deal with those who are tender, and weak, and unprepared. Our strength is employed to their good and enjoyed in their company. That is the true heart of a father. It is a context of relationship changes everything.
Posted in Arts & Literature, Mind & Society, Reading Around | Also tagged Africa, Cities, Classics, Father's Day, Harvard, Heroes, Hollidays, Latin, Parenting, Sarah Ruden, Translation, Troy, War & Peace | 6 Comments
Why True Stories Are Important – Elie Wiesel
Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.
--Listen to the whole testimony: A God Who Remembers
Posted in Margin Notes, Reading Around | Also tagged Elie Wiesel, History, Holocaust, NPR, This I Believe | Leave a comment
Beowulf: Behold the Man
You think you've heard about swords, and heroes, and fire-breathing dragons, and friendship, and glory, and treasure, just 'cause you've read those Potter books? C'mere, boys, let me tell you a tale...
Posted in Arts & Literature, Reading Around | Also tagged Beowulf, Dick Ringler, Heroes, John D. Niles, John Gardner, Movies, Norman Gilliland, Reading Around, Reviews, Seamus Heaney, Theater, Wisconsin Book Festival | 1 Comment
The Story of the Flood – Disaster and Hope on the Horizon
Stories are always told in specific historical contexts, but the human condition always brings us back to recurring issues, thus:
Teatro La Fragua used “neo-medieval post-modernism” to stage the story of Noah and the Great Flood in a relief shelter after Hurricane Mitch, and Paul Chan is staging Waiting for Godot in the Lower Ninth Ward [...]
A National Day of Listening