https://wapo.st/3Sct3EL Cautionary tales abound about the danger of persnickety obsessions with seeing the one thing wrong with an other wise splendid entity. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tale The Birth-Mark presented to the Sophomore English Honors class at St. Peter’s Prep in 1966 by Mr. John Casey told of the peril of obsession with trying to remove the […]
Tag: testing
Our Problems With Authority III: The Helluva Lot of Hail Marys Project
The final installment in our trilogy about Our Problems With Authority takes on the hard part: what do we do about them? No easy answers, but lots of references read and considered during this exercise that should be important to all of us. We need both freedom and authority, we need to regain a commonality among citizens
TESTING ASSUMPTIONS: Our Problems With Authority Part II
Authority itself is inherently an act of imagination Richard Sennett By definition, an assumption is a belief or concept taken for granted. Testing assumptions generally only happens when circumstances contradict that which we have presupposed as rules and realities of life. Or we want to make sure that our current plans under those assumptions won’t […]
Defending Your Writes: Are How-To Books for Authors Hooey?
Short answer: Depends upon what you consider a ‘How-To-Write’ book Yes, my good and faithful readers,’ ‘writes’ is a word; Obsolete in most places admittedly and only used in northeastern Scotland as of 1974, but it’s a real word signifying ‘A written record or work; a book, a letter, a document, etc.’ Even if it […]
TESTING ASSUMPTIONS: NOT BORN YESTERDAY BY HUGO MERCIER
The subtitle of this book is The Science Of Who We Trust And What We Believe, and its purpose is to disabuse us of ideas about how we decide, who we can have faith in, and what we should accept as real. Mercier, research director at the CNRS, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris, is of the […]
Testing Myself
Chasing the Dead Today is Samhain (pronounced “Sow-win) in the old Celtic calendar. The Irish of pre-Christian time — and still these days with New Agers and would be witches and druids — believed that the veil between the living and dead worlds was thinnest at this time. To those who march up dark hills […]
Not The Greatest
What makes a thing or person ‘the greatest’? How did we judge it to be “having the “most significant effects, importance, distinction” over all other similar items? With Muhammad Ali saying he was the greatest the proof was in all those other boxers stretched out on the canvas, but even then my uncles would say […]
Claims Will Always Matter, But Sadly Bob Mislevy Is Gone
Recently, my attention in these writings focused on rebutting the prevalent notion among the punditocracy of the left (center, far, handed) that the problem with the corruption, unconstitutionality, and general havoc of the current federal government our electorate chose came about because a certain large segment of our citizenry were bedeviled and bewitched by misinformation. That […]
This is a Test: Maybe Everything Is
Four and a half hours on hold. That was the experience Friday afternoon that led me back to this argument: everything is a test. I had come across the phrase again recently reading the letters of Seamus Heaney. He cited his friend and sometime collaborator and my playwriting model, Brian Friel as the source of […]
Taking the Straight job to Pursue the Creator’s Arc
What an inspiring obituary of Frank Auerbach, the great British painter! His art invites powerful perceptions, but the patience of his life also animates strong feelings in me this morning as I keep rewriting the latest play and consider other projects.