Author Archive
Learning to eat
Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual is the action-item, CliffsNotes version of his In Defense of Food. A very quick read, it contains 64 rules of thumbs for eating more healthily. These rules emerged from his own research as well as from soliciting reader comments on the New York Times’ Well blog. To get [...]
An inside look at Islam
While spending a few weeks in the Middle East, I read the book Islam: Religion, History, and Civilization by Seyyed Hossein Nasr. I found the book to be very informative, as it outlines the main doctrinal beliefs and history of Islam from a traditional Muslim perspective, denouncing both fundamentalism and Western modernity. The overarching message is that Islam is a [...]
Only connect…
Buzz and Wave and e-mail, oh my!
How do we communicate when? There are no hard and fast rules, but these are the guidelines in the back of my mind:
Blogs are a great medium to go on at length about a given topic (whether it’s yourself or an arcane area of expertise) without targeting specific [...]
Illiteracy
Literacy is such a fundamental aspect of modernity that we cannot imagine not reading. If there is a series of strokes that can be interpreted as letters, the brain just treats them as such. They may represent a word I know or a weird admixture of foreign sounds—it doesn’t matter: I can’t not parse the [...]
Israeli workout
Though we’re staying at a fancy hotel here in Tel Aviv, the gym is extra. And really, what’s the point when there are free outdoor gyms on the boardwalk? I’d call them “adult playgrounds,” because that’s what they look like, but you’d get entirely the wrong idea.
Every morning I run on the boardwalk by the [...]
