Why do intelligent, educated people feel they have to explain away their love of People magazine — or worse, deny its awesomeness? My friend Kathleen informed me that she once belonged to a book group composed of lawyers who made their book choices exclusively from recommendations in The Economist. They read things like a biography of Potemkin. Google tells me that this could be a) a Russian nobleman, b) a […]
I recently discovered that Netflix offers instant streaming of one of my favorite childhood movies: The Incredible Shrinking Woman. So of course I had to watch it with my kids. The boy was deeply skeptical; he had recently watched Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and complained that he was tired of movies where people shrink. I explained to him that this “new” movie was an entirely different animal. It does […]
Slowly (so very, very slowly) I’ve been reading my way through the classics of Western civilization. I purchased a couple of book collections to that end a few years ago. One is the Great Books of the Western World, published by Encyclopedia Britannica (bought on eBay for roughly 1/6th the retail price) and another is called the Five Foot Shelf of Knowledge, or officially, the Harvard Classics. This set is […]
Flabby Brain 