Brick

Now let’s regard Roger Ebert this after­noon. What his pass­ing yes­ter­day, Thurs­day the 4th of April 2013, can mean. Like any death that strikes your radar, knock­ing it off the table, you feel a need to inven­tory your­self. Most of what I could say I chis­eled nearly two years ago, when I pre­sented him, by …

The essay by Angie Albright, “Blog­ging IS Real Writ­ing,” posted Nov. 28, 2012, at Arkansas Women Blog­gers, impressed me and, judg­ing from social media reac­tions, many of my fel­low scribes. It fol­lows exactly from the title, an apolo­gia for the form. I agree, blog­ging is writ­ing, but skip the defen­sive “real.” Of course she’s being …

This col­umn first was pub­lished as the “President’s Mes­sage” in the May 2012 newslet­ter of the National Soci­ety of News­pa­per Colum­nists. Dear Larry, [NSNC Vice Pres­i­dent Lau­rence D. Cohen is on the slate of nom­i­nees for the May 6 elec­tion, for 2012–14 pres­i­dent.] This, the colum­nists pres­i­dency, has been a hum­bling expe­ri­ence. I’ve had plenty …

When you’re middle-aged, what the hell is a friend, any­way? Some of my favorite peo­ple I see for one long week­end every year, a con­fer­ence. In between there will be a hand­ful of emails and, these days, rather more fre­quently, single-sentence repar­tee on Face­book. I often have met their spouses, briefly, but damn if I …

Copy­right 2011 Ben S. Pol­lock I met Vaclav Havel once, while he was pres­i­dent of Czecho­slo­va­kia. We were in a cas­tle. Oh, and I avoided shak­ing hands with him. Now, he’s dead. Not that I’d ever had a chance to renew the, uh, acquain­tance. In Sep­tem­ber 1992, I was in Europe for a trav­el­ing jour­nal­ism sem­i­nar, …

Copy­right 2011 Ben S. Pol­lock When teach­ing (it’s been awhile) or just yakking, I find greater util­ity in broad def­i­n­i­tions. News, for exam­ple, “is what­ever is new, what­ever is dif­fer­ent.” Mean­ing front-page, top-of-the-hour news. That’s where are found recount­ings of hero­ism, and more often tragedy. Print and broad­cast are front-loaded mainly with bad news, which …

Copy­right 2010 Ben S. Pol­lock The occa­sional, ama­teur anthro­pol­o­gist in me has been study­ing the spouse for 19 1/2 years. Occa­sional dis­cov­er­ies have been made dur­ing the field work, but a rev­e­la­tion has occu­pied the study recently: There’s two of her. I’m pretty sure of this because there’s two of me. My Beloved has the usual …

The most use­less habits can be the hard­est to break. The three most annoy­ing rou­tines have dwin­dled to one. None of them ever was harm­ful. For me, it was a curios­ity, why keep on, no plea­sure, not even any risk. The first silly habit I knocked off as an adult was to forego the comic strip …

It’s been some three decades since I last watched them do it, and I can’t quite repli­cate it. I wish I could mul­ti­task like my par­ents, who excelled at the feat before it had a name. There’s one round of activ­i­ties of theirs that I envy. They could read mys­ter­ies and nov­els (Mom) or thrillers and …