No thinker has jolted my world view like Harvard, Stanford, MIT scholar, Canadian Steven Pinker. He studies language, mind, and human nature and gives us a view of the trajectory of human history that, like an object too close to focus on, is too much part and parcel of who we are for us to […]
— “Living with materiality is not what I do.” What a treat for me to get to write a profile of Lois Schroff. Born in 1924, she still is delightful at 101. And when I told her how much fun it had been to interview her since I got to ask such personal questions, she
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You may know me as that Shakespeare-trivia-obsessed person. In a piece I wrote for the Ojo, I noted that Edward de Vere and his lover, Anne Vavasour, were thrown into the Tower when Queen Elizabeth discovered that her lady-in-waiting was pregnant, and by whom. I’d read somewhere that she languished there longer than the three
Yelling at ChatGPT Read More »
Even as the Stratford man became popularly identified as Shakespeare some 150 years after his death, many readers knew he was a very unlikely candidate, but if not him, whom? It was popular, and reasonable, to consider people known for their brilliance, like Bacon, or people known for their playwriting, like Marlow. One had to
Cleopatra Blushes—Identifying Shakespeare Read More »
‘…the biggest and most successful fraud ever practiced on a patient world.’ William James When I imagine the intelligent, educated, alert faces of my readers, I am nevertheless made uneasy by the suspicion that there may be one or perhaps even two of you who are still holding the belief that the peasant from Stratford-upon-Avon
In my mid life a cluster of friends and relatives died, and I found I had never felt so fascinated by life and the possibilities for introspection, demands for it even, as the light flooded in through the existential crack. I began to wonder if a change in career was the right path for me.
Crossing the River Read More »
If you don’t know A Visit to Don Otavio, Sybille Bedford’s delightful book about Mexico, all told with love of foible and with sly humor, I am here to prod you into filling this local-color lacunae, as did praise from the most prestigious publications, which fell over themselves at its 1953 publication. Born in Germany
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Arriving up in Zacatecas (8,148 feet above sea level) for a visit from the coast one June, my husband and I found all the clichés describing high altitude air—cool, crisp, crystalline, effervescent—to be fresh and new. Blocks of the centro looked to have been imported straight from 16th or 17th century Spain, which of course
Encounters With History Read More »
Before Ajijic and Chapala existed, before the Spanish conquest and Christianity, before the Aztecs came looking for the eagle and the snake bringing the god Huitzilopochtli and the Flower Wars, there was Cosalá. On the forested shores of the lake, Cosalá—meaning Place of Trees in Náhuatl—had existed for who knows…two thousand years? More? The people
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I was waiting for the lluvias to remind me—do you first hear the rustle, the distant hiss of rain crossing the lake and making its way up the hills, or does it start with that special lovely smell, that unique earthy perfume? I have guessed that it might be both: the smell might come from
