In a recent conversation with my friend, Maribel Cardez, she introduced me to the term, logical empathy. “Well,” I thought, “at the intersection of intellect and emotion, there’s bound to be some uncertainty, if not volatility, no?” I had to look it up, of course. It turns out logical empathy, which may also be referred […]

In a recent conversation with my friend, Maribel Cardez, she introduced me to the term, logical empathy. “Well,” I thought, “at the intersection of intellect and emotion, there’s bound to be some uncertainty, if not volatility, no?” I had to look it up, of course. It turns out logical empathy, which may also be referred […]

As regular readers of this column likely know, Grandpa O’Brien was an inveterate storyteller. And while my father wasn’t quite the storyteller his father was, Dad (his name was Ned) would talk to anyone, anywhere. Depending on your perspective, I seem to have inherited the best — or the worst — from both of them. […]

It’s been a while since I wrote about our moving adventure. That was 2022. We’re now well settled and very happy … most of the time. For most days during the summer, we have the windows closed and the central air on to keep us from the sweltering heat and the stifling humidity. But in […]

In case you don’t have a Facebook account (which is the platform on which I learned the news) — and especially if you didn’t read my earlier post on AI — I need to tell you it’s over. According to the ad I saw, Sudowrite — the best AI writing partner for fiction — is […]

It seems as if I’ve been seeing more and more articles advising us to avoid electronic devices in bed or at bedtime. Because I’m a word-game junkie, because I play Zen Word in bed on my i-Phone to help me relax before falling asleep, and because after I complete a level in the game, I […]

A while ago, I wrote a post in which I referred to a woman for whom I once worked as the Queen of the Malaprop. For those of you who might not be familiar with the term, a malaprop, which is short for malapropism, is the use of a word or phrase in place of […]

Those of you who saw last week’s post are fully aware of the attempt to take advantage of me and my … uh … digestive byproducts. And, like me, you might have thought the story would end there. No such luck. A week ago Saturday, I received registered mail, purporting to be from Exact Sciences, […]

Prologue In the summer of 1974, I was 20 years old. I was admitted to the Hospital of St. Raphael (now part of Yale New Haven Health) for surgical repair of a Bochdalek hernia. (Since most such hernias manifest symptomatically shortly after birth, how mine came to be diagnosed at such a relatively late point […]

According to Buddhist tradition, Siddhartha “Sid” Gautama was a prince born into the Shakya clan around the 5th or 6th century BCE, in Lumbini, which is now modern-day Nepal. His father, Suddhodana, was a chieftain or a king. His mother, Maya, died shortly after his birth. Sid was raised in luxury in Kapilavastu, sheltered from […]