by Mark O'Brien | Jun 18, 2015
White is the new black. I don’t know yet if black is (or can be) the new white. (All things considered, why would black people want to be white anyway?) But I do know that seriousness — like empiricism — is a dying art. I wonder: Are we grateful that we have the...
by Mark O'Brien | Jun 17, 2015
For those who don’t know his work, Frederick Exley’s passing 23 years ago today will be as the great preponderance of the world’s myriad events — unknown, unseen, unremarked. For those of us who know and love his work, his passing marked the loss of...
by Mark O'Brien | Jun 15, 2015
When my sons were younger, I’d take them to a pediatric ophthalmologist, Dr. Mitchell, for their periodic eye exams. During one such visit, somewhere around the time of my 40th birthday, Dr. Mitchell handed me an article about the perils of radial keratotomy....
by Mark O'Brien | Jun 8, 2015
As readers of Chautauqua know, I’ve been acquiring a heightened awareness of gluten sensitivity. Linked to disorders as disparate and seemingly unrelated as Bonkus of the Konkus and chronic valetudinarianism, gluten also can be traced to innumerable behavioral...
by Mark O'Brien | Jun 2, 2015
Thanks to a client, with whom I was working through the terms of a new agreement (amicably, or so I thought), I learned a new word the other day. It presented itself in a sentence of otherwise unremarkable, albeit characteristically tortured (syntactically speaking)...
