by Adam | Saturday 10 September 2011
Here is my (glancing) 9/11 piece on Hakeem Olajuwon and moderate Islam, which I wrote for Tablet. We spent humid afternoons in our driveways imitating Hakeem the Dream’s signature move. Called the Dream Shake, the maneuver was famous for freezing...
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by Adam | Wednesday 3 August 2011
Happy to be this week's contribution to Pork Memoirs, a blog curated by my friend Jeff, whose research on the pork industry in Israel is going to blow minds near and far. Check out my piece here: Number One was...
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by Adam | Thursday 16 June 2011
I was recently asked to lend my musical "expertise" to help a future mother compile a list of tracks for her gestating child to listen to while both inside and out of the womb. The parameters were classic, but not...
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by Adam | Sunday 8 May 2011
Christopher Hitchens, who is ill, writes about his loss of speech in Vanity Fair. It's some sad and heavy work. Without our corresponding feeling for the idiolect, the stamp on the way an individual actually talks, and therefore writes, we...
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by Adam | Sunday 27 March 2011
I wasn’t a consistent hitter, but often times I was just patient enough to labor through an at-bat and coax a walk even out of a good pitcher. I’d take the base and then wait for the inevitable, in the...
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by Adam | Monday 21 February 2011
And it's her birthday today. It's true that I often lampoon my mother for forwarding me really cheesy e-mails and so I thought, as a tribute, I would share one recently sent forth by my big sister. The Polite Way...
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by Adam | Tuesday 17 August 2010
...I’ve listened to historians explain how the Csarist army conscription/pogrom narrative from my grandfatjer’s generation is really a perpetuated myth. An overblown tall tale. How closely Morris Bober’s flight from Russia in Bernard Malamud’s book The Assistant resembles the story...
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by Adam | Saturday 10 July 2010
Michael, the Sheikh Ahmed Yassin spiritual advisor of TFR/naturalized Israeli responds to my quite pessimistic first post from Israel with this: You're a dickhead. I hope desert flies bit your ass while you tried to sleep. I will now reverse...
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by Adam | Wednesday 30 June 2010
Friends, Apologies for the early dearth of material; they've got me running around the country through fifteen hour days and early mornings (my bane). I never thought I'd say this, but I can't wait until the Sabbath when I'll have...
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by Adam | Monday 7 June 2010
by Adam | Tuesday 2 March 2010
It's a busy week before I head to Texas to write an exposé about the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, so I'd like to ask you a quick favor. As you know from that last unhinged-sounding/insomnia-produced post, I built a...
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by Adam | Friday 11 July 2008
On the ride home from the airport, Mom and I stop at the Farmer's Market. It's 98 out but the booths have a steady fill of people who are all slightly uncomfortable talking to the farmers. We sample cheese...
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by Adam | Tuesday 3 June 2008
I could likely devote an entire website to the subject of Sundays. I ran four miles, down the Westside Highway to Battery Park where a lot of Europeans and Asians were shuttling between Ground Zero and the ferry to the...
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by Adam | Friday 2 May 2008
it makes everything seem possible. This all came from one day, last Monday, which was the first day of spring. First the aliens landed: On the subway uptown I turned the tables on a sketcher: I ran around the reservoir...
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by Adam | Tuesday 22 April 2008
We hit it off, I am saying things I don’t say, not psychopathic or dirty things but rather, honest things, strange and vulnerable things and we are sharing drinks that are spilling out from being overpoured, but we are liking...
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by Adam | Tuesday 29 January 2008
(Inspired by an LCD Soundsystem song of the same name and Laphroaig single malt scotch whisky) I am away from something I know, but its essence envelops me on cold meanders down 14th street toward the river in the winter....
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by Adam | Thursday 1 November 2007
You must be in a very strange place when you listen to a new Radiohead new album. I mean a very strange place in the physical sense, a locality which is not common to you, not a foreign emotional...
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by Adam | Saturday 11 August 2007
I woke in a panic as I had missed free breakfast at the hotel and had overslept to counterbalance the difference between my intended and actual bedtimes. I was due uptown (which is a totally inaccurate but wholly-of-habit term) in...
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by Adam | Sunday 5 August 2007
Baseball in America is alive and well in Alabama. Or maybe America in baseball is alive and well in Alabama, where outside of Birmingham, our national pastime still thrills, if only as sideshow to a more salient national pastime,...
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by Adam | Thursday 19 July 2007
He was formed half by the ethics of his father and half by the cruelties of war... -Foreword to a Yehuda Amichai anthology. #4 of Amichai's Seven Laments for the War-Dead 4 I came upon an old zoology textbook, Brehm,...
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by Adam | Sunday 15 July 2007
Saturday we were talking about getting old and it's funny because we're not but these conversations are the conversations had until it's finally true. Saturday's idee fixe (and the idee fixe of most Saturdays) on aging came out of spending...
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by Adam | Wednesday 11 July 2007
As I wade through the work and myriad chores that precede my next great adventure, I thought to show this minor homage to summer. We're almost to a full year of Trust Fund Reporting. Thank you for keeping me...
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by Adam | Friday 6 July 2007
by Adam | Sunday 1 July 2007
Baseball is not what it used to be. While dive bars and stadium stands are still (mostly) full of fans, stalking their teams with the requisite fanaticism, there is a lump in the collective throat of the baseball electorate...
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by Adam | Friday 22 June 2007
Solstice Dusk was counterveiled by the rivulets and burnishes amid the comedy of the park. We met on the longest day and we had no letters on or need to request its cessation. I stayed on your pillows beset by...
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by Adam | Thursday 14 June 2007
...We moved to the inevitable banalities of small talk; the birthday plans we'd miss, the future we’d share as the friends we never were; and of course, the nascent hurt and missteps bygone and beyond unknotting. Our textbook and singular...
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by Adam | Thursday 12 April 2007
Though I realize that the world does not (Thanks Michael) need any more obsequious Kilgore Trout tributes... From A Man Without A Country: "I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science-fiction...
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by Adam | Monday 19 February 2007
These are the kinds of e-mails that my mother forwards to me. Two astronauts land on Mars. Their mission: to check whether there is oxygen on the planet. "Give me the box of matches" says one. "Either it burns and...
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by Adam | Thursday 1 February 2007
Here is something wonderful. I spent the end of last week with a visiting Hassan who came to New York on his way to the Bahamas. I know, it's a tough life for a Harvard student. In the aftermath...
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by Adam | Thursday 30 November 2006
At the General Assembly, which I neglected to finish writing about because I am all Jewed out right now, I went to a forum which featured Michael Parks, the former Editor-in-Chief of the Los Angeles Times, a spokeswoman from...
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by Adam | Sunday 5 November 2006
Hemingway On a walk in Jaffa, I watched the port close for Shabbat and the sunset on the sea from a pier where Arab fisherman stood with their poles and bags of bread in anticipation of their dinner. Some...
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by Adam | Saturday 4 November 2006
A drive through the West Bank on the ides of March was less eventful than my thrill-seeking mind had subversively hoped for. A tire burned outside Jericho in protest of an Israeli raid that followed a Palestinian attack on Red...
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by Adam | Wednesday 1 November 2006
March 12, 2006 In Israel, Purim is celebrated in walled cities exactly one day later than the rest of the country. The logic of why always escapes me. Some interpretation of some text from sometime, much time before now....
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by Adam | Monday 30 October 2006
While I was in Israel before summer (circa March 2006), I was participating in a project for www.100words.net, a site where you write an entry totaling 100 words each day for a month. Logical enough... As I was recently looked...
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