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It's 2017. I am now married. I left New York almost two years ago with my wife. I now live in Switzerland. Donald Trump is the President of the United States of America. He beat Hillary Clinton last year, electorally but not popularily. It feels like the system was hacked somehow. A part of me yearns to go back to New York. But one by one people I used to know there have also left. The city feels a bit hollowed out now. Perhaps what I yearn for is not New York but the idea of it. A teeming metropolis. A place where the future was being built. Friends who flitted in and out. Like one big college dormitory. The macro and the micro, both large and essential. All of us looking for and optimistic about what lies ahead. Perhaps that is a feature that belongs to young adults, one that I no longer am able to call myself. I have rounded squarely into a grown adult. My age technically rounds up to 40 now. I have had my time in the sun as a young adult. To have loved and lost is b...

O ne of the anti-heroes of the explosive Vice News report on Charlottesville is Chris Cantwell, who in one particularly memorable scene near the end was shown showing off the assault weaponry collection he brought to the rally to an admirably fearless Vice correspondent Elspeth Reeve in a hotel room and proclaiming the car that drove into a crowd was justified and saying he believes many more will die violent deaths before the alt-right movement is over. Watching and reading and thinking about this whole Charlottesville episode drained me. I had to take a nap. (Like, I guess, a delicate little snowflake.) It appears astonishing that men like this exist in 2017. Is he actually pure evil? And if so, I thought... what's that like? Seriously, what's it like in the head of a human who is evil incarnate? Is it cartoonish? Is he like Dr. Claw? Is he like Chucky? Cantwell has a website called Radical Agenda where he posts all his podcasts and webcasts and whatever. His latest ...

I magine you're in a fight with someone unreasonable. Perhaps a teenager or someone prone letting emotions override rationality. It's likely futile to win them over via oral argument. You can't make someone see sense when their focus is to BEAT YOU. Imagine you win because the two of you agree to let someone else decide and that person takes your side. Now, because your opponent is unreasonable, he/she is unlikely to take it well. Instead, he/she is likely to double down and sabotage and passive-aggressively undermine you along the way. Oh, also imagine you're generally better off than this person. You have more education, earnings power, net worth, etc. But you look like him/her and have similar ancestry. This person, he/she has a lot of energy. He/she is fueled by dissatisfaction and you've generally not done a lot to help him/her out. In fact, you often feel a bit disgusted and sometimes do a bad job masking your disdain. Now imagine a time has com...

I was so excited for Game 7 the night before I couldn't sleep. It seems stupid now. I, half a world away and unable to watch it live, tossing and turning and dreaming non-stop nonsense, losing sleep over a game that doesn't involve me nor any of my friends or family or even any towns I've ever lived in. John Maynard Keynes once predicted that our society would advance to a point where we would have more leisure time than ​we know​ what to do with. ​I suppose the existence of billion dollar sports and entertainment empires validates his hypothesis. Most of us in the first world no longer worry about food or shelter or having to do hard labor just to survive. And voilà, there I was, losing sleep out of excitement over a game.​ In the morning I fired up the NBA app on my Nexus and strategically covered every portion of the tablet with my blanket except the small "replay" button beneath the scoreboard. Yes, I practiced this spoiler-free technique the night before. T...

Warning: possibly gross shit in this piece. But not gratuitous -- medical in nature, if it must be categorized. Anyway, reader discretion advised. I think of them as contractions, although they're obviously not, and I'm most likely insulting the opposite sex for even connoting it as that word.  Still, the periodicity and the escalating frequency and pain warrants the analogy in my head. I suppose what they really are are stomach cramps. Belly aches that are a precursor to diarrhea. But I wonder -- does it hurt this much to everyone else? This morning, it snuck up on me while I was in the subway. A twinge. By the time I was walking towards the coffee truck, the "contractions" started with earnest. I briefly considered bailing on my caffeine fix and heading straight towards the office lavatory instead. Sometimes I think I ought to categorize the severity of these stomach cramps like one would a tornado or a hurricane. They are by far the worst pain I experience on ...

"Arguing Their Way Into Love" - By A.O. Scott *** T he difference between most film critics and the late Roger Ebert is that the former often seem naggingly worried about sounding clever and erudite, whereas Ebert foremostly adheres to the maxim: "A man goes to the movies. The critic must be honest enough to admit that he is that man." I miss Roger Ebert and his writing. But anyway, here's A.O. Scott praising Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, which I watched, and which I thought was not nearly as great as Scott's gusher, which seems to highlight more the greatness of the source material... which is a giant "no, duh, it's Shakespeare", which ergo appears as Scott wanting to show off how well cultured he is. I went into the screening with high expectations, due in some part to the lamentable A.O. Scott piece, and due to the fact that I, like most '80s children, came of age on a solid dose of Whedon-produced pop culture. Whed...