Frozen Toothpaste

Spend much time online, and you’re sure to find at least a few people telling you that reading and writing on the internet is like nothing you’ve ever done. They’ll tell you that readers don’t, well, read on the internet. Instead they skim and look for lists with bullet points. Oh, and pictures. They love […]

Outside my window, the rarely-trafficked street is still white, only the manhole cover that managed to melt through gives a hint that there’s anything not white under there. The gray sidewalks — which must be shoveled both as a courtesy to fellow pedestrians and out of fear for the law — form a coherent border between the white over […]

Today’s “Other People’s Words” is a poem about what’s really important. It’s called “Beside the Point” by Stephen Cushman.
The sky has never won a prize.
The clouds have no careers.
The rainbow doesn’t say my work,
thank goodness.
The rock in the creek’s not so productive.
The mud on the bank’s not too pragmatic.
There’s nothing useful in the noise
the wind […]

A few days ago I created a new text document on my desktop — the way I almost always jot down notes when I’m at the computer — and titled it “the mandarins” and put this inside:
I used to believe that the world was controlled by extraordinary individuals who were somehow different than people like me. I’ve come to […]

By now you’ve probably heard something about a teddy bear in the news. But it seems to me that the way people understood the story had a lot to do with where they heard about it. So in the tradition of this piece, I’ve created two very different interpretations pared down from different news sources.
First […]