Why College Education Will Never Be the Same Again — According to current data from Insidehighered.com, if you were to ask a decent number of randomly-chosen professors on any college campus whether they believe that in-person learning is superior to online learning, over half of them would say “yes.” If you asked me that same question, I would answer: “I’m…

A confession to my readers — The thoughts that I will share with you, my dear reader, may shock and upset you. They may cause you to dislike me. But I am willing to accept that risk because I need to to confess. Writing allows me to exit my own thoughts for a while. Judge me…

I asked him to break my heart — It seems odd to me that life is, in many ways, so predictable; that certain actions are almost never positive. It is never a good idea to dwell for too long on unrequited love, for example. Why? Because it is better for us to live in the real world, to…

My brother’s oldie-but-goodie deserves a close reading — Storybookland Plastic castles six feet tall. The animatronic band playing music in the hall. Reality crept up oh so suddenly It was enough to startle me In the mirror house At the carnival. I took a photo from nowhere I tried to see from no perspective. I took two steps…

The angst is palpable in my brother’s latest single — Starved of everything you needed, The sacrificial lamb was in your bed. Those sounds I hear from your apartment, You can tune it out but you can’t replace your head. I did not forget the name I lost the number. But you wrote it out into the ledge. You thought…

A short lesson on the virtue of patience — Today I received a trash can in the mail from Amazon. Yes, that is correct. I told Amazon to send me a trash can via the U.S. Postal System. When I first opened the box, I noticed a little piece of paper flutter out of it. That was the warranty. …

Alain Resnais’ dialectical unity of contrasts — In the synopsis of her screenplay for Hiroshima, mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959), Marguerite Duras explains the decision to film a love story in Hiroshima. Why choose Hiroshima over any other place in the world? The question might well have remained rhetorical, but Duras offers the following justification for the…

Does watching a movie ever cause you to question reality? — In the second volume of What is Cinema?, French New Wave critic André Bazin remarks that cinema is compelling insofar as it maintains a delicate balance between realism and artifice. Bazin goes a step further, arguing that artifice engenders realism in cinema. Though this may sound like a contradiction at…