Category Archives: General

Final Exams: Who Needs ‘Em?

A good friend once described studying for the bar exam as ‘a Bataan Death March of the mind.’ That description both trivializes the horrors of the Death March and gestures toward what seems to me, from the outside, to be the mind-numbing, anxiety-inducing tedium of bar-exam preparation. Interminably long video lectures, flash cards, memorization ofContinue reading “Final Exams: Who Needs ‘Em?”

Readin’ and Ridin’: The Subway Car as Reading Room

Like many New Yorkers, I do a lot of reading on the subway, standing or sitting. (It is a depressing fact, of course, that too many of us now seem fixated by smartphones, playing video games, or texting endlessly.) Sometimes I walk into  a car with a book already open, sometimes I seat myself, openContinue reading “Readin’ and Ridin’: The Subway Car as Reading Room”

My Father’s Aviator Sunglasses

As a young boy I loved and admired many things about my father. Foremost among them was the fact that he was an Air Force pilot, a decorated one, one who had fought in two wars, capable of feats of valor and skill that boggled my juvenile mind. He seemed impossibly charismatic. How could heContinue reading “My Father’s Aviator Sunglasses”

The Return of the Ink-Stained Finger: Writing with a Fountain Pen

As a youngster, I used fountain pens to write. I started my school career by writing in pencil, and then at some point, we were switched over to fountain pens by fiat. School work had to be done in ink; ball-pens didn’t count; and that was that. I do not remember my first shopping tripContinue reading “The Return of the Ink-Stained Finger: Writing with a Fountain Pen”

That Beehive in Your Head? That’s Just the Net Calling

Like many users of the Internet I suffer terribly from net-induced attention deficit disorder, that terrible affliction that causes one to ceaselessly click on ‘Check Mail’ buttons, switch between a dozen tabs, log-in-log-out, reload, and perhaps worst of all, seek my machine immediately upon waking in the mornings. My distraction isn’t unique, but it hasContinue reading “That Beehive in Your Head? That’s Just the Net Calling”

Edmund Burke on Pakistan and the Loyalty of Armies to the State

Friedrich Leopold Freiherr von Schrötter said of the Prussian Army during the reign of Frederick the Great that ‘Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country.’  Schrötter made this remark in response to the size of the Prussian Army–which then numbered almost 200,000, a puny number, incidentally, compared toContinue reading “Edmund Burke on Pakistan and the Loyalty of Armies to the State”

Getting the Living and the Dead Wrong: Mistaken Censuses and Transient Fame

Sometimes I find that someone I had counted among the living has passed away a while ago.  After the initial easy-to-understand embarrassment—for I have revealed my lack of knowledge of the world of the living after all–I often feel an absurd personal regret of the No-it-cannot-be-I-hardly-knew-ye variety. The regret is mostly absurd because the departedContinue reading “Getting the Living and the Dead Wrong: Mistaken Censuses and Transient Fame”

Against Commencement Cermonies

I have never sat through a commencement address; I have never managed to finish watching a recommended one on YouTube; and I certainly have not ever read one to the end. (The other day, in a bookstore, I noticed a little book containing an apparently famous one delivered by David Foster Wallace; I couldn’t finishContinue reading “Against Commencement Cermonies”

Hyman Strachman the Pirate AKA Troops Supporter

Hyman Strachman is a pirate. But he doesn’t fly the Jolly Roger, drink rum, hop around on a pegleg with a cutlass tucked neatly into a cummerbund, board ships while yelling “aarrr!” or call anyone a ‘scurvy bilge rat.’ Rather, he buys DVDs, makes multiple copies of them using a ‘duplicator’ and ships them toContinue reading “Hyman Strachman the Pirate AKA Troops Supporter”