Books
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 [...]
Looking back on a marriage
Music I heard with you was more than music / And bread I broke with you was more than bread
Thus did Hugh Franklin propose to Madeleine L’Engle, beginning the union chronicled in Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, book four of the The Crosswick Journal series of L’Engle’s autobiographical writings. This [...]
Short Story Delight
Sometimes I get so caught up on things I have to do or want to do that I forget to read. When I do read, I seem to be turning more to non-fiction than anything else (who would have guessed?), so that when I do finally remember how much I enjoy narratives, they come as [...]
The Drunkard’s Walk
We’ve been discussing more and more in my office the idea that secondary education ought to require a course in probability and statistics more urgently than a course in calculus. Yes, calculus is fascinating and elegant, a true achievement of the human mind, but unless students continue pursuing science or engineering, they probably won’t use it again. I’m a big [...]
