Stick-figure doodle of my alter ego Curly Girl. She is holding a megaphone and standing on a wooden box labeled SOAP.

Whose writing is it, anyway?

A fellow writer just asked me whether I use AI to improve my writing productivity; if I do, what tips would I share with beginners, and if I don’t, what would help me get started? I sat with that for a bit. Then I chose Option 3: I don’t and I won’t and here’s why. […]

A dragonfly hovers close to the viewer, its transparent wings catching sunlight. In the fuzzy background is blue sky and bluer ocean.

Ob-la-di, ob-la-da

It started at my grandmother Rose’s burial. She and my Grampa Irving had been married for almost sixty-five years, so it wasn’t surprising when she lasted only two months in a world without him. The funeral was in late June. So it also wasn’t surprising to see a dragonfly flitting around on the warm breeze […]

Sepia photograph of a paragraph from Lord of the Rings Book 3: "We must walk open-eyed into that trap, with courage, but small hope for ourselves. For, my lords, it may well prove that we ourselves shall perish utterly in a black battle far from the living lands; so that even if Barad-dur be thrown down, we shall not live to see a new age. But this, I deem, is our duty. And better so than to perish nonetheless - as we surely shall, if we sit here - and know as we die that no new age shall be."

Harvard, Veritas, and Gandalf

My feelings about Harvard are complicated. But when I think about how I want my alma mater to conduct itself right now, that’s simple. I hope Harvard will spend down every damn penny of its endowed billions rather than let the Trump administration break them, if that’s what it takes. There is no rainier day […]