Last week I saw the film The Banshees of Inisherin and the other night it won the Golden Globe award for “best picture, musical or comedy.” Best musical or comedy? One of the characters plays the fiddle, but this is no musical. And I did laugh a few times during the film, although given my stunned and sad state after leaving the theater, I would never classify what I saw as a comedy. But did the...
As a Buffalo native and a lifelong Bills fan, I was watching the Bills-Bengals game with Owen last Monday night between two premier NFL teams fighting for playoff positioning. We saw Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapse on the field. By now, most of the country knows what happened: after making a hard tackle on a Cincinnati receiver, Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest. The Bills training staff and...
Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere—and therefore the longest and darkest night. I’m thinking about light. Not the demure natural light of the low sun on this day, but the artificial light we use to beat back the darkness. In my safe, residential neighborhood of mostly single-family houses, I am surrounded by light on all sides. The neighboring...
The world may not need one more take on season two of Mike White’s The White Lotus, but it’s getting mine anyway. The seven-episode season on HBO lands in what I consider a sweet spot in storytelling length—about six to eight hours of programming. This length also works well for adapting novels to the screen, which rarely transfer in any satisfying way to a two-hour feature film, but gain...
My daughter Julia is one of those people in my life I want to check in with every day. Not to keep tabs on her, or her on me, but because deliberately and proactively thinking of the people I love the most is time well spent. Enter Snapchat, that simple social media platform that claims it’s the easiest way to share a moment. Snap a photo, usually a selfie, add an optional caption, and send...
It’s not that surprising that Miriam-Webster Dictionary chose gaslighting as its word of the year. The term first gained use in the mid-twentieth century due to a play and a subsequent film called Gaslight. Its definition then, according to Miriam-Webster, was: Psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their...
I wake to a strange reddish cast of light in my room. Is it the apocalypse? I get out of bed and stumble my bleary way to the window and there in front of me is the most incredible dawn. By the dawn’s early light. This has to be an omen of good things to come. Sure enough, while I’m getting dressed, I choose a shirt from my drawer I have not worn in months, and folded inside it is my...
That’s my friend Howard on the left. He’s the frontman for the rock band the Coal Palace Kings. They get it on every Black Friday, this year at the Hangar on the Hudson, a cavernous, spartan venue in Troy, NY. If you miss the Black Friday performance, you don’t get to see the Coal Palace Kings. They perform once, maybe twice a year, these oldish guys who’ve been loving and playing music all their...
It’s fire season again. Thanks to my local crew that hones in on any fallen hardwood tree in Delmar, and our joint ownership of a beastly wood splitter, I’m stocked up on seasoned firewood. Nothing like an evening fire in the kitchen and in the living room—the joy of a two-sided fireplace. Pumpkin approves. My battery died on my laptop and replacing it required prying off the entire back of the...
I recently read an article in Fortune titled “Let’s not circle back on that: These 10 corporate buzzwords are the most hated in America.” Then I came across a report in the Harvard Business Review that said writing in the financial industry is so full of jargon and complexity that poorly written financial statements can actually harm a corporation’s market value. As someone who’s written volumes...
What is it about air travel that makes it so ripe for speculative storytelling? Maybe it’s the improbability of flying 30,000 feet above the earth in skinny metal tubes. Or as a passenger, the complete surrendering of any sense of control over your fate. A recent French novel and an American television series both rely on a similar premise about air travel. In the NBC series Manifest (now...
Driving on the highway back from North Carolina, we see a sign that the right lane is closed in one mile. Immediately drivers start switching to the left lane, leaving the right lane open. I do the opposite, switching from the left lane to the right lane, while the left lane backs up almost to a standstill even though the right lane doesn’t end for close to another mile. I cruise in the right...
Did you know that fictional characters can be an important part of your social network? Most people know that social interactions are important to your well being. And according to Dr. Laurie Santos, the Yale professor whose course “The Science of Well-being” I took, “. . . when we can’t get the real thing, we’re pretty good at finding creative ways to fill those gaps.” There is a social...
Back then, my literary agent, who I had just signed a contract with to represent my novel, “Stash,” asked me if I’d ever heard of Robert McKee and his book, “Story.” I hadn’t. She suggested I get the book, read the book, and then work on my novel some more. I had mistakenly believed the novel was finished. After all, she’d agreed to represent me, so she must have thought “Stash” could sell. But...
Somewhere in the backwoods of Western Pennsylvania stands a house called Fallingwater designed by the iconic twentieth-century architect Frank Lloyd Wright. I’ve always wanted to visit Fallingwater—considered one of Wright’s masterpieces—and I finally did. The famous view of Fallingwater. I grew up in Buffalo, NY, where I never tired of walking past the two Frank Lloyd Wright houses in my...
