Spin, "Weezer Goes to Harvard"

"Anybody know where Whitman Hall is?" On the frozen February afternoon I was supposed to meet Rivers Cuomo, only two of the many Harvard pedestrians I stopped had even heard of the dorm, current home of the cerebral Weezer frontman. (The 36-year-old rock star is finishing his final tour of collegiate duty — he started at Harvard in 1995 and has been attending on and off ever since.) It might have been the weather or Ivy League attitude or dumb conversational luck, but some of the students even seemed pissed-off by the simple geographical question. Nonetheless, I battled my way through the chill and eventually had my audience with Cuomo.
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Poets & Writers, "Improvisers and Revisers"

It took a long time to write these words. I'm not referring to the psychosomatic affliction known as writer's block. I mean the delays caused by the process of composition and revision. The clichés I've killed! The drafts I've lost! The existence of this page -- this paragraph -- is a marvelous feat of Darwinian staying power. It has gone through so many minor and major tweaks that I can barely recall what it looked like when I began (on December 11, 2005, at 8:14 P.M., to be precise). The road from rough draft to final manuscript was a lengthy, indirect one, with so many wrong turns that I feel carsick just glancing back in the rearview mirror.
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Poets & Writers, "Cabin Fever"

It is 5:45 A.M., and after walking the thirty steps from my bed -- quietly, so as not to wake my wife, or my three-year-old daughter or my almost-one-year-old son -- I reach the study and blindly punch my computer's power button. As it starts up, I begin to inventory the various items on the oak desk I share with my wife. The papers and bills, the baby monitor from which sounds of my son coughing can be heard, my daughter's green butterfly princess wings, a pile of blank CDs, the phone, and the miniature toy "cubicle" that was given to my wife by her coworkers. "In this office, you're the boss!" reads the tag line on the box. Amid the detritus of my bourgeois lifestyle, I sit down to begin the day's writing.
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The New York Times , "From a Scientist's Life, Art's Cautionary Tales"

Despite the flurry of attention over the continuing announcements of this year's Nobel Prizewinners, many previous recipients in the prizes' 104-year history remain unfamiliar. So it is not surprising that many Americans are unaware that Fritz Haber won the 1918 Nobel in chemistry for the invention of a process used to manufacture cheap fertilizer, which helped feed billions. Or that he made modern chemical warfare possible with his development of chlorine gas and personally oversaw its use in World War I.
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Boston Globe Magazine, "Designing Women"

On a recent evening at the Brookline restaurant The Fireplace, seven local architects and two interior designers, all women, jammed themselves around a table to eat and drink and talk. There was much to discuss, including Julia Morgan, the trailblazing architect who designed Hearst Castle in the early 20th century; the rigors of "archi-torture school"; and the differences between men and women in the architectural world.
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Technology Review, "A Woman on a Mission"

Once upon a time in the early 1990s, political scientist Elizabeth Prodromou, SM '89, PhD '93, got no respect -- or perhaps just the sort of respect grudgingly meted out to people who work in obscure academic fields. She was studying the mutual influence of religion and politics in southeastern Europe and the Balkan countries and teaching at Princeton University. However, back then "the interest of social scientists in religion had been largely dominated by a single perspective -- namely, that religion was either irrelevant to or problematic for modernity," Prodromou says. Moreover, policymakers didn't show much interest in learning how an understanding of religion could help them with security matters or worldwide efforts to promote democracy.
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JBooks.com, "The Trouble with Talking to Cynthia Ozick"

I once had a conversation with Cynthia Ozick. This was last October, in the prim, polished lobby of Boston's Four Seasons Hotel. Well, we began in the lobby and then, after a run-in with one of the lobby's glimmering lamps -- "Do you think that light is shutable-offable? It's so glarey, and they'll probably be mad at us if we try" -- we booked it to a booth in the hotel restaurant for hot chocolate and talk.
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Boston Globe Magazine, "The Ghosts of Our Exes"

So we're wrapping up dinner with another couple at Chef Chang's House in Brookline. The fortune cookies arrive, and, as is our habit, we begin reading our fortunes out loud. Standard harmless Chinese-food fun. Then comes my wife's turn. "An old flame," says Lisa, "will return to steal your heart." Reaction around the table is predictable -- a quick smile or two and a sarcastic "Uh-oh!" -- but suddenly I'm quiet and moody. Just who is this so-called old flame? And what kind of stupid fortune is that, anyway? I actually say to myself: "You were supposed to be the one to get that cookie. Why didn't you grab it before she did?"
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New Jersey Monthly, "Learning Lessons"

Robert Parker was the best teacher that I ever had at Hightstown High School. I always thought of him as a man of real integrity. Sure, he could be sarcastic and intellectually gruff, but he didn't nod and smile at us in a patronizing way, like so many of the other teachers at school. His toughness was offset by his appearance, which was not at all intimidating. He was a tall, thin guy with a withered right hand. But with Parker, it wasn't the way he looked, it was the way he talked.
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Poets & Writers, "My Job Interview with Susan Sontag"

Susan Sontag, the author of four novels, including The Volcano Lover and In America; a collection of short stories; several plays; and eight books of nonfiction, including Against Interpretation and On Photography, died on December 28 in New York City. She was 71. I had the chance to meet Sontag, back in 1995. On a November afternoon she called me on the phone about, of all things, a job...
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Boston Globe Magazine, "Future Shock"

Who would have predicted that 2004 would be the year Boston finally threw the Curse of the Bambino out with the bath water? Only the most optimistic baseball futurists would have made such a prognostication a year ago. But now it seems we're a city with limitless potential -- in baseball and beyond.
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Boston Globe Magazine, "Vowel Langauge"

The champs' first play is OUTVIE. They spin the board around and, as it rotates, I say, "Out-vee?" Their coach, Mark Fidler, a math teacher at Buckingham, Browne & Nichols School in Cambridge, corrects my pronunciation "out-vhy" and gives an impromptu lecture on why players should not pronounce Scrabble words out loud. Without warning, the Survivor motto (outwit, outplay, outlast) swims into mind, and I quickly understand that Nick Amphlett and John Ezekowitz, the two BB&N Middle School students sitting across from me, aren't messing around. They're sending a message.
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Boston Globe Magazine, "My Fare Lady"

Hop into Louise Samson's cab, and you'll get called names. Nice ones. The fares she likes she calls "cutie," "dear," "hon," "honey," "my boy," and/or "sweetheart." She's like a mom on wheels, which is what she is: Samson is putting her three children through college by driving a cab. Her key ring reads "mom's taxi." She distributes Blow Pops to her passengers. And on the March day I rode along with her, she even wore a snazzy pair of socks with Blow Pop logos printed on them.
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Boston Globe Magazine, "Spaced Out"

Phoning outer space is a complicated business. I know. On a July afternoon, I chewed the extraterrestrial fat with astronaut Edward Michael Fincke, who, as part of the two-man, six-month Expedition 9 mission, has been floating around the International Space Station since April. Our 20-minute conversation took weeks to schedule, involved two phone lines, numerous sound checks, and the following exchange...
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Boston Globe Magazine, "Ad-Ribbing"

You know how Barry and Eliot Tatelman, a.k.a. the Jordan's Furniture guys, always needle each other in their TV commercials? Turns out, the sibling raillery never -- ever -- ends, even after the director (a tall, tan guy named Rich Sturchio) yells "Cut!" Last month, I watched from the sidelines for a day as they shot four new spots at Cramer, a Norwood-based production company that makes commercials and corporate events. The Cramer building, a boxy light-green structure on a long road of office parks, looks like a pack of wintergreen gum. Or at least it does at 8 a.m., which is the ungodly hour this shoot is slated to start. Where do you get the coffee?
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Poets & Writers, "Learning to Read A Doctor's Books"

Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, "Does there not exist a high ridge where the mountainside of 'scientific' information joins the opposite slope of 'artistic' imagination?" This was, of course, a rhetorical question, but Nabokov's own life proved that this connection indeed exists. A dedicated lepidopterist (one who studies moths and butterflies), Nabokov not only held a post at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, he also wrote Lolita, a classic of 20th-century literature. I was recently reminded of Nabokov's butterflies in, of all places, a dead man's apartment in Boston.
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The New York Times, "Facing the Consequences of Not Going"

Sometimes, you just have to say no when your boss asks you to take a business trip. Sometimes the boss understands, sometimes not.
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The New York Times, "Boston to New York: Four Ways to Make the Trip"

The 200-mile distance between Boston and New York is one of the busiest corporate travel stretches in the United States. According to NYC & Company, a tourism marketing organization, 316,000 Bostonians travel to New York for business each year. The Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau estimates that almost a million New Yorkers return the favor. Now, there is a new way to connect the cities.
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Salon, "Philip Roth: The Zuckerman Books"

The decision to make a sequel is almost always a business decision. Though spinoffs may be good for the bank account, they're usually bad for art. The general rule is that with each new installment the overall quality drops (think Meatballs III, Lethal Weapon 4, Rocky V). Serious artists don't work on the installment plan. But don't tell this to Philip Roth.
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The Forward, "When Suffering for Art Means Sucking in Your Gut"

Every mother-in-law watches her son-in-law closely, but mine has been known to eye me with brow-furrowed intensity for three hours at a clip (with the occasional five-minute break). Which is to say, I was drafted by Carol Barenberg (www.barenberg.com), the painter, to pose. My wife, Lisa, and I are slated to star in a wedding portrait -- a triptych, actually -- and so we flew to Carol's studio in Rock Island, Ill., for a week of modeling.
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The Forward, "A Hemingway Named Horowitz?"

Why have I spent years agonizing over the fact that the novelist and short-story writer James Salter, author of such little-known classics as "A Sport and a Pastime," "Dusk and Other Stories" and "Light Years," was born James Horowitz? Perhaps it was the kamikaze way in which the news crashed into my life. I learned of Mr. Salter's original sobriquet in the mid-1990s, after finishing "A Sport and A Pastime" and "Dusk and Other Stories." I saw a listing for Mr. Salter in the Dictionary of Literary Biography and eagerly read the opening paragraphs, among which I found nine alarming words: "James Salter was born James Horowitz in New Jersey." Questions swarmed: The guy's a Jew? Why the hell doesn't he mention this anywhere?
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Boston Business Forward, "And the Band Played On"

It's 7:30 on a Wednesday night in August, and the Back Bay office of Aquent, the $150-million-a-year staffing company, is rocking. A few employees polish off a spaghetti dinner in the company kitchen. Others begin rearranging the tables in the conference room. A second bottle of wine is opened, and the talk turns nostalgic, to the Friday-afternoon soirées, complete with free food and alcohol, that the company used to throw-until the economy tanked.
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