Sometimes I have read books for the most superficial reasons.  A family member gave one of my kids Time and Again, by Jack Finney, telling her it was one of his favorite books as a kid.  That piqued my interest because this family member and I generally have similar reading interests.  But what really got…

Chovos HaLevavos, Duties of the Heart, the 11th century work by Bahya ibn Paquda, was one of the first mussar books I learned in my late teens/early twenties.  Parts of it made sense to me, and much of it felt too far off from where I was at that stage of my life.  Recently a…

Like many others, I first discovered Nate Silver in the lead up to the 2016 election through his FiveThirtyEight website and podcast, which tracked the US election polls.  And, as with the election cycle, I didn’t pay much attention to him in the intervening years.  But in the leadup to the last election, I heard…

One of things I like about my job is that I always get to learn new things.  Given my transition to Gesher/Yeshiva Prep, most of the new learning has been about learning disabilities, specifically language learning disabilities, which is the population we serve.  So far, the best overview I’ve read of what language-based learning disabilities…

The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources tells a story about an industry that I didn’t know existed in the first place.  Written by two journalists, it is about the people and corporations that trade in the world’s natural resources.  It’s an industry that really came into existence…

Last year, a friend lent me a book called Squeegee Kid, by S.E. Tomas.  It was the autobiography of a man describing his experience of homelessness as a young man.  It was raw, gritty, powerful, and in a strange way, hopeful. This was not because there was a ‘good’ ending, but because what came out…

I first came across John Jeremiah Sullivan in his role as the editor of David Foster Wallace’s collection about tennis, String Theory. I noticed that he had his own collection titled Pulphead Essays, and given his admiration for Wallace’s non-fiction (which I love), I thought it would be worth the try.  I started the first…

Robertson Davies existed for me as the name of a Canadian author who was recognizable, but not on the radar of someone to read.  The problem is that Canada has a bad habit of employing a kind of affirmative action for our artists, giving them priority simply because they are Canadian. This creates a sense…

The most common response to my living in New Jersey and commuting to Brooklyn is some combination of a smile (laugh?), amazement and then pity. I can’t say this didn’t make me nervous before we moved. For the last seven years my commute was anywhere from 3-5 minutes, depending on how many red lights I…

There are words being used today that I’ve had trouble making any sense of, like the use of “genocide” when describing what Israel is doing to the Palestinians, or “settler-colonialism” as a description of Zionism itself.  I’ve had a hard time telling whether they are outright lies, distortions of language, or something else entirely.  Adam…