A week ago my wife and I went to see the new Aaron Sorkin film The Social Reckoning, a sequel of sorts to the writer’s 2010 film The Social Network. If the earlier film portrayed the birth of Facebook, the new one delves into the company’s maturity—if that is the right term. In it, Mark Zuckerberg is played by Jeremy Strong as a CEO so cold-blooded that...
Read More
The calendar read September, but the air was muggy and still when my wife and I had the good fortune this month to visit Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece of a house that is considered by more than one expert to be one of America’s greatest contributions to world architecture. It’s in Pennsylvania—deeply rural Pennsylvania, that is, where it...
Read More
It must have been 1990 when I encountered the writing of Charles Bowden for the first time, not coincidentally when I first found myself traipsing around the Sonoran Desert in winter and early spring. For a young man from the suburban Midwest the scenery was a revelation: mountains stood like purple cardboard cutouts on dawn horizons, then transformed...
Read More
During the same week in June, two freakish things happened. A rare but welcome incursion of monsoon moisture entered Arizona from the south, scattering welcome showers across parched forest and grassland, but also throwing down lightning bolts that set off dozens of wildfires. Elon Musk, meanwhile, became the world’s first trillionaire, reaching an...
Read More
There isn’t a lot of time for reflection as the spring semester winds down, so thick is the calendar with projects and presentations and heaps of grading decisions to make, but in late April there were some mornings when the cool temperatures and bursting green leaves brought to mind wistful thoughts of a long-ago spring that for me was also defined by the...
Read More