by Mark O'Brien | Jun 23, 2016
The perils of ingesting gluten have been fairly exhaustively chronicled, here and in other other, almost equally august media. Nevertheless, as is our incorrigibly human knack, we remain susceptibly gullible to all manner of fads, frauds, flimflams, and other forms of...
by Mark O'Brien | Jun 6, 2016
Sometimes, we measure our gains by taking the measure of our losses. In the span of two-and-a-half years, three hugely influential men have passed from my life — my father, B.B. King, and now Muhammad Ali. There was a point at which I couldn’t imagine my life...
by Mark O'Brien | May 16, 2016
Trying to get through a recent post of nearly 4,000 words, which turned out to be an infomercial for an equally windy 124-page report from Deloitte, put me in mind of this passage from Alice’s Restaurant, since the post contains … … twenty seven...
by Mark O'Brien | May 9, 2016
An ‘ideology’ is like a spirit taking up its abode in a body: it makes that body hop around in certain ways; and that same body would have hopped around in different ways had a different ideology happened to inhabit it. (Kenneth Burke, 1897-1993, from Language as...
by Mark O'Brien | Apr 20, 2016
A client told me she’d gone to Madison Square Garden to see David Gilmour on the last night of his recent North American tour. Hearing that gave me gifts of reminiscence both nostalgic and whimsical. Thinking about David Gilmour and Pink Floyd always reminds me...
by Mark O'Brien | Apr 7, 2016
The blind squirrel found an acorn. It was bound to happen. After stumbling around in an amaurotic crepuscule, falling out of a few trees, and living in a virtually opaque stupor, the scansorial rodent finally discovered what empiricists working with even modestly...
