Sermonette?
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 […]
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 […]
Copyright 2010 Ben S. Pollock Something that’s amazed me my entire adult life is how lousy a predictor childhood is of adult success. Children reared with all the advantages, the latest psychology and/or consistent discipline — turn out as anything from national leaders to routinely stable mid-levels to layabouts. Children born in abusive families or […]
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 […]