As you probably know by now (even if you didn’t want to), the social media site Twitter was recently purchased by Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, for $44 billion dollars. He immediately took the company private, fired much of the workforce in performative and arbitrary ways and with relished…

Unrolling the map of yourself a little farther — Paris in the summer is hot and not really built for heat. Air-conditioning is rare, as is ice, and the only cold things we regularly experience are the looks from Parisians after confirming their suspicions that we are Americans. Still, even sweaty this city earns its reputation as beautiful and…

A simple guide — You bring him home from the hospital, in our case so early that you haven’t yet bought him a bed. You look at him, inscrutable in a quickly assembled bassinet, and set about understanding him. You hold him. You hold him until, and while, he learns to walk, then hold…

She’ll be gone a good hour, perhaps two. You’re happy, of course, to watch the kids while she pays respects. Don’t think, obviously; nothing good can come of that. Try to make yourself useful instead. Maybe look for the long blue spatula, the one good for flipping hash browns for…

The air better today in New York but still bad, the dashboard I now keep open on my phone shows a needle down out of lavender but caught just into yellow. You can still detect the burning, though, a bass note under the shots of espresso being pulled on the…

It’s not what you think — Only one of the two small elevators at the Ace Hotel in downtown L.A. works, but the young person with floral forearm tattoos working the front desk assures me that everything’s fine. The Ace (calling itself “ADTLA”) is designed to communicate a casual, rock vibe — autographed electric guitars for…

The Jack Shaiman Gallery’s decision to split its “Gordon Parks: Half and the Whole” exhibit in NYC made some sense. The West 24th Street location was given over to his potent images of social-justice protest — crowds holding signs and newspaper headlines about Blacks killed by police that could (and…

The calendar said that 2020 began on January 1 like always, but the year had its own official start for each of us. Our kids’ school abruptly decided to close a day early in mid-March for spring break, and at the time we all thought we’d be back to something…

We discovered that the ACT was canceled due to the pandemic for the third time just two days before my son M was supposed to sit for the test. The first cancellation was in March just when everything slid into the sea of the pandemic; the second test date was…