Love, Service, and Choosing a Career
It was in the course of reading Micah Goodman’s essay in the periodical Sources that I first came across the formulation of love by Erich Fromm. In the essay, Goodman explains Fromm’s work this way: In 1956, the psychologist Erich Fromm published his groundbreaking book The Art of Loving, a fascinating indictment of much of […]
Throwback: Passover 2020
I recently went back through some archives, and I found a piece that I had written at the very beginning of our county’s Coronavirus shutdown. Oh wow, the memories. Re-reading now the words that I chose then feels somewhat otherworldly, as though I can’t quite believe it was I who described the curious new world […]
Birds of a feather, agree together
This week, I stepped in the muck in a Facebook post. As a Jew, a friend had posted what she felt was an obvious response to a contemporary issue of anti-Semitism. I don’t want to get into the details, but a (seemingly well intentioned but non-Jewish) friend of hers disagreed that the issue in question […]
Mean Girls, Adult Style
Rosalind Wiseman, the author who wrote the book that inspired the hit movie Mean Girls is suing Paramount Pictures. According to her lawyers, she is trying to share in some of the earnings from the blockbuster hit her work has turned out to be. You can read about it here or here or anywhere else, […]
Making the Most of Time
Last week, Wired magazine published an interview with author and artist Jenny Odell, on the topic of her new book, Saving Time. I read her book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy a few years ago, and I loved it immensely. It was so dense and thoughtful that I thought that I absolutely […]
Christian Seders: Yay or nay?
The holiday of Passover is coming up— for good reason, I don’t know the exact number of days because it is a deadline that inspires a lot of anxiety. But it’s soon. This year, on FaceBook, one of my friends is hosting a preparatory screed against Christian Seders. That is to say, she is angrily […]
Fangirl Moment: Jill Lepore on Writing Well
I recently came across this short, two-page paper written by Jill Lepore called “How to Write a Paper for this Class.” It was meant for her students of history at Harvard University, but I love it immeasurably and think it is much more widely applicable. To be fair, when it comes to Jill Lepore, I […]