In light of current events, I’m dropping the bleak Waiting for Godot from my World Drama class (actually I’m making it optional; students could drop a different play) and adding Thornton Wilder’s absurdist but optimistic The Skin of Our Teeth. Writing while World War II was still raging, Wilder depicts a representative American family…
The blurb for a 2011 English version of the 1999 Chinese play I’m teaching this week: China’s most popular and provocative drama. A modern story of love and obsession, Rhinoceros in Love tells the story of a rhinoceros-keeper who develops a dangerous romantic fascination with the woman of his dreams: the uncompromising, unobtainable Mingming. Hear…
Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break. After the Federation colony on Raina IV is obliterated, the Enterprise discovers a perfectly preserved house with two elderly survivors. The standoffish Uxbridge impresses Worf by confronting strangers with a non-functional hand phaser, and the hospitable Rishon tells a charming story of how the two fell in love on Earth.…
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Carolyn and were recently cast in a historical film. I recorded my video audition last week, feverish with an upper respiratory tract infection, coughing and gulping from a mug of tea between lines. Our characters are in different time periods, but we each get to fight someone in a duel. Filming for our scenes was…
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Are you unexpectedly home-schooling your kids? Every family is different, and every kid is different. But I think anxious parents who are in unexplored territory probably need to hear this: you won’t hurt your children if you don’t keep them academically occupied for a block of 7 hours. On a typical brick-and-mortar school day, kids…
Copper is antimicrobial. It kills bacteria and viruses, sometimes within minutes. In the 19th century, exposure to copper would have been an early version of constantly sanitizing one’s hands. Since then, studies have shown that copper is able to destroy the microbes that most threaten our lives. It has been shown to kill a long list…
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CNN’s Stephen Collinson praises the president’s Monday press conference. This version of Donald Trump will save lives. The President offered Americans something they have rarely seen from him in his latest and most somber press conference yet on the coronavirus pandemic on Monday. He dispensed unimpeachable information based on fact. He called for national unity and…
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I don’t know that much about the world of finance. This was a helpful explanation of what it means to say the Fed “injected” 1.5 trillion dollars. According to Slate, that money was in the form of short-term loans, not a gift. “Again, this is all short-term lending against the safest collateral in the world,…
Those mean fake news people at the Washington Post are at it again, this time pushing a series of four simulations that vividly illustrate the impact of social distancing. Where do they get off, creating clear and informative graphics to illustrate a scientific principle? What do they think they’re doing, some kind of public service?…
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People typically think of soap as gentle and soothing, but from the perspective of microorganisms, it is often extremely destructive. A drop of ordinary soap diluted in water is sufficient to rupture and kill many types of bacteria and viruses, including the new coronavirus that is currently circling the globe. The secret to soap’s impressive…
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