Category Archive For "Creative Play"
2 Very Different Parent-Daughter Movies
We went to two movies this weekend. Surprisingly, they were both about parents and children. Other than that, they were wildly different. (Spoiler alert: I’m about to say things about both Everywhere Everything All at Once and Aftersun. If you care, stop now.) Everything Everywhere All at Once is an Oscar contender, starring Michelle Yeoh, …
6 Things I Learned from Wordle
Like a lot of people, I played Wordle a lot this past year (see below). It’s ingenious, both simple and complex in the way that can remain intriguing over time. Six guesses to come up with a five-letter word sounds simultaneously super-difficult and pretty easy. Six seems like a lot, until you’re looking at S-A-E on …
Some ‘Mountain-Climbing’ Advice from Writer George Saunders
Listened to George Saunders’ first collection of short stories, Civilwarland in Bad Decline, this summer and all the things I enjoy about Saunders’ writing were there. But the real treat was his writer’s note at the end, where he shared his experience as a not-so-young writer who pursued writing while living a middle class existence with …
6 Thoughts on Jerry Maguire, 26 Years Later
Virginia and I continued on a torrid pace of movie-watching, this time watching Jerry Maguire with friends on New Year’s Night. One couple had never seen it. I hadn’t seen it in more than a decade, maybe closer to two. Anyway, I reacted to it a little differently than I did back in 1996. Some thoughts — …
Why Laughing at the Seinfeld 9/11 Spec Script Felt So Wrong and So Right
Lately there have been a few things coming together and making me wonder about the long shadow of 9/11. I just finished re-listening to Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, which is an exhaustive take on Osama bin Laden, from his birth through his misadventures to his almost inexplicable eventual success and post-9/11 scurrying to Tora …