drmstream[writing]

  To put it even more bluntly: whereas one would have expected that a cri­sis of lit­er­acy would have called for a greater appre­ci­a­tion of the mul­ti­plic­ity of func­tions that lan­guage per­forms, the fore­most of which is the abil­ity to code and transcode expe­ri­ence and to pro­vide cul­tural direc­tions for its inter­pre­ta­tion, han­dling and elaboration, […]

  Recently, I was talk­ing with a math­e­mati­cian. He was ani­mated as he talked about the beauty of math, the thrill of tak­ing an axiomatic sys­tem and using its prin­ci­ples to build a bridge to a solu­tion for what appears to be a wholly unre­lated prob­lem. The excite­ment in his man­ner was infec­tious and deep. He […]

I take Adderal. I didn’t used to.  I’m writ­ing an essay about it — the work­ing title is Under­stand­ing My Stu­pid. The thing about writ­ing an essay is that you have to tease out the sense in things that are loosely con­nected in your head.  Some­times the essay peters out because the things that you […]

You could tell when he got up to the podium that he had seen some­thing that he couldn’t leave behind, that time had stopped and he was claw­ing at it. He was the last speaker for the night. He wasn’t pol­ished. His hair was uneven, plas­tered on his fore­head by a layer of sweat. The suit […]

Sit­ting in the sec­ond story of a two-story row house in Brooklyn’s South Slope, I searched for the voice that would tell my 21-year old daugh­ter Becky some­thing about liv­ing. She’s laid up with a bro­ken foot that’s keep­ing her from work­ing at the micro-distillery where she found a job after com­ing back from Louisiana, […]

My sense of self and my pri­vate desires got boxed in a mile high in the sky yes­ter­day. I almost didn’t make it through. I was fly­ing out to Los Ange­les for a busi­ness meet­ing. I had a win­dow seat in the front of the plane. An attrac­tive and com­posed young woman sat in the […]

I. I called you as soon as I got back to my apart­ment.  You picked up.  My liv­ing room was hot.  I couldn’t breath.  You didn’t say any­thing.   The silence was like dark blotches of ink.  The phone line crack­led. “I’m com­ing back down.” “You don’t have to.” “I want to.  Will you be there.” “You don’t […]

An old tree came down at the edge of the prop­erty in a wind­storm. It sat below the cot­tage at the edge of the farm road. The base was mas­sive and marred with water bumps, knocks and scars. Time had thinned out the top, mak­ing it appear fore­short­ened against the sky. The trunks and branches […]

I’ve been won­der­ing if I have an old rejec­tion let­ter from Grand Street some­where in my files. Ben Son­nen­berg, the founder of Grand Street, died this month. He was a young man with an inher­i­tance who wanted to read good writ­ing, so he started a mag­a­zine. I was so excited when the first issue came out.  […]

Being good at being a human is like get­ting cer­ti­fied to fly with instru­ments:  it takes hours of train­ing and we rarely get it right the first time. In a blog post last fall, anthro­pol­o­gist Melvin Kon­ner wrote his excite­ment about the new sci­ence devel­op­ing that would influ­ence the study of the human con­di­tion. He framed […]