
The Inconvenience Store
The modern market exists to give us what we currently don’t already have, and … what we do not have is the luxury of waiting.

The Zanesville Cut
The Zanesville cut was one of the ways I kept the pulse of the heartland, to know if it was dying faster than me. Happily, it never was.


Taking It to the Street
The man-on-the-street interview is an integral part of any self-respecting newspaper … The Mount Vernon News used to do one regularly before they moved their newsroom to Manila, besides Buzzfeed’s offices.

I Confess: I was the Bishop
You would think you could trust professors who hem and haw over semicolons to get properly sentimental about a building, but no.

Hindsight is 2020
Larger institutions are merely the collective inertia of private hopes and wills, and I think many of us face the raw and primitive work of having to start over again, within.

Tractor Thoughts
A John Deere’s gearbox has a great deal more personality than a whole server farm of artificial intelligence, anyway, and more motive power besides.


A Review of Bossa Nova, U.S.A.
Panned as pedestrian at the time, I praise it for the same reason; it is very much a song about walking about the town that I met in it.


The Autumn of Our Content
The arrival of pumpkins at market, in particular, is one thing I feel should receive 24/7 coverage.

Flying Home
The differences between the technological revolutions of the 20th century and the 21st century is that the first was a victory against nature; the second is a victory against mankind.

A Review of Jazz at the College of the Pacific
If you wish to kill a thing, discuss it in technical terms.

On Gravedigging
It is almost a transactional thing; you hope your future interment will be generous enough to place you beyond the reach of whatever future mobs you anger, if you do this creature that kindness.

We Petty Men
The removal of Lee's monument is typical of our epoch's scorched-earth discourse.


Goodbye to California Street
Somehow, many nights become few. The lease says so. The evening says otherwise.

One Night Only
It was a moment Kruschev and Nixon could not have imagined, standing there in the kitchen.

The Gallery Café
Far from being customer-obsessed and other LinkedIn truisms, the café does not give a damn.

Goodbye to Cleveland
For those who like such things, there was an odd loneliness in Cleveland, truly unique to the area.