I hate when people make fun of Cleveland, and I really hate when journalists are too lazy to come up with an original lede. So this summer’s coverage of the Republican National Convention, which never failed to use the 1969 Cuyahoga River fire as a laugh line, had me in a near-constant state of rage. […]
Category Archives: Musings
Krysta Rodriguez and Mike Read “Chatbot”
Another one. Mike writes; I edit; and this time, Krysta Rodriguez reads. Tweet
Michael Emerson Reads “Light Show”
Mike writes; I edit; Michael Emerson reads. Tweet
Pancakes in Ohio
I was going to write something last week about the New York Times “This Land” series on Elyria, Ohio, a city just east of where I grew up. It was going to be a brilliant essay about Americana porn, and East Coast condescension, and an eagerness to see poverty and struggle as a somehow noble […]
Cleveland Watches the Finals
Last night, when I heard the Dallas Mavericks had defeated the Miami Heat, four games to two, I cheered. I don’t know very much about basketball, and I didn’t follow the N.B.A. Finals. But I’m from Cleveland, and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. I will root for any team the Pittsburgh Steelers […]
Lessons
On September 2, 2001, I arrived in Rome for a semester abroad. My pensione’s lone TV didn’t get any English stations, and my Italian wasn’t good enough for me to make sense of the newspapers. As a result, I spent most of that fall in a state of hyper self-awareness, intuiting the season’s events in […]
Townie Kid
I grew up not far from Oberlin College. In high school, my friends and I would drive the 20 minutes south on Rt. 58 and hang out at the campus coffee bars. I didn’t drink coffee at the time and wouldn’t for years, not in college or when I started working, though I embraced every […]
Bunnies and Bullets
When I was five years old, my parents left my brothers and me with a babysitter and went to a church auction. They returned–fantastically, inexplicably, unprecedentedly–with a secondhand ColecoVision and a box of games, and I hopped from foot to foot as my dad delicately connected the console’s wires to the back of the TV […]
En Fuego!
January was cold this year, so cold that I contemplated lighting myself on fire on more than one occasion. February hasn’t been much better. So hooray for this warm sexy explosion of a video, which my husband sent me today. I watched at my desk, over and over, as outside people struggled vainly against the […]
The Cle
It’s 62 degrees and raining: the first real day of fall. It’s the kind of afternoon that reminds me of Cleveland, where I grew up and where I returned to after college. In October of 2004, I moved from the East Side to Lakewood, to the first and only apartment I would ever have all […]