In the late spring of 2001, back in the days of innocence, before the complete rupture of innocence, really, I flew down to visit a friend of mine who was renting a house in Charleston, South Carolina. It was my first time in the real South. The weather was perfect and I felt carefree. My friend had tickets to several…
Last week I told you about my personal challenge to pause at the beginning of one meal each day in a moment of meditation or gratitude before eating. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I haven’t been very successful so far in achieving that goal. “I never thought of food as something our bodies need to physically survive. I…
Part of the reason I am troubled by conspiracy theories is because they are so reductive. They take a complex, explosive, and almost always tragic event (otherwise, no one would be paying any attention to it) and cram it into a template that “proves” it was a premeditated crime, coldly committed by members of a group that has a secret…
One summer when I was a teenager, my mother was nervous about a cousin’s impending visit. Pam had become a vegetarian and my mother had no idea how to cook for her. How would she get any protein? My mother was deeply worried. My father, who loved hamburgers and steak, was much calmer. “Tolstoy and Gandhi were vegetarians, and Thoreau…
When people learn that I have cancer, they usually stammer, sputter, turn pale, and back away. When people learn that I am a vegan? They get mad. The other day I had a phone conversation with a woman who organizes an annual spa day for women with cancer. She told me that a speaker a few years ago said that…
When I arrive at my job, several people run to the door to hug me. During each day, at least one person falls out of her chair, someone bursts into tears, and several people fail to complete their assignments. My co-workers drop food on the carpet, flip upside down into headstands, and make fart jokes. Half of them interrupt me…
For a long time, neuroscientists have regarded video games as a form of brain candy. Played in excess, they were thought to erode short-term memory and attention span, and lead to other kinds of mental decay. And it’s been well documented that multitaskers—particularly older multitaskers—perform worse on cognitive tasks than those who live by the old Zen adage of “eat…
I was raised by Italian-American parents. At our house, every Sunday dinner was a multi-course extravaganza. Family and neighbors and friends sat down to a table laden with pasta, meatballs, chicken, salad, vegetables…. Meals at our house were all about overabundance, just as in all the popular movies where the Italian mother puts food on the table and hollers, “Mangia!” I…
The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is currently presenting Soundings: A Contemporary Score, its first major survey of sound-based art. Most of the artworks combine both sound and visual components, but some are pure audio with nothing to see at all. As I walked through the exhibition, I began to consider and categorize the types of sounds…
