News & Notes
Life With Dog
One of the greater sadnesses of my life is that I never had a dog. As a child, there were cats in my family, first Orange then Dusty and Cleo. At the time I didn’t really know I wanted a dog because none of my friends had dogs so there was no first hand evidence of how remarkably better dogs were than cats. My doglessness was an absence barely felt. Continue reading →
Alice of Nepal
Now here’s a curious story. A few months ago, Sparkle Hayter went on a writing retreat to India. During a trip to Nepal to renew her visa, a bedraggled, half-starved puppy crossed her path. Sparkle tried to find a decent home for it, but the puppy refused to be with anyone else. So, despite the fact that Sparkle is a poor, wayward writer with no fixed address – and a cat person to boot – she adopted the dog and named her Alice. Continue reading →
Unconscious Triggers
One of the most interesting subjects I’ve researched over the past year has been the power and possibility of the human unconscious. Every moment of our lives, we are bombarded by far more sensations—sights, sounds, odors, tastes, textures—than our conscious brains can process. This means the vast majority of these stimuli are acted on by our unconscious brains and alter our behavior without our awareness. Continue reading →
Switching Crossword Blog Camps
I’ve been doing The New York Times crossword puzzle for about ten years and have slowly made my way from being able to complete the easy Monday and Tuesday puzzles to having an 80% completion rate for Fridays and a respectable 60% completion rate for the brain-dizzying Saturday puzzle. Continue reading →
Am I A Lexical Genius?
The other day, I was involved in a heated discussion over the merits of the sentence ‘Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.’ Continue reading →
Bid On Me (For A Better World)
For the past few years, I’ve been writing essays for Ode Magazine that explore the science and poetry of the human condition. Thus far, I’ve dealt with subjects such as the role of altruism in economics, the importance of dissent in society, and the spiritual value of boredom. Continue reading →
