One of the big choices we faced was whether or not to find out whether the baby appeared to have male or female sex characteristics during our 20-week ultrasound. This, of course, is not the way people usually frame this question. The ordinary question is more like “are you going to find out what it … Continue reading Anxiety and the Gender Politics of the Unborn – or – Why We Didn’t Find Out
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The Hospital Tour
“CHILDBIRTH IS NOT AN ILLNESS BUT A NORMAL HUMAN PROCESS.” This was the simple sentence I heard for the first time during a presentation at Illinois Masonic when Brooke and I went for a tour a few weeks later. A attractive mid-thirties woman with an ambiguous European accent and short blonde hair led the tour. These … Continue reading The Hospital Tour
Our First Midwife Visit
Our first appointment was in a tiny room on the third floor of an annex to the Illinois Masonic hospital, just a few steps away from the northernmost exit of the Brown Line’s Wellington stop (since this is where Sam was born, everytime we go by there on the train I get a shiver and … Continue reading Our First Midwife Visit
The Birth of Our Child – Introduction
Susan Sontag once wrote "strictly speaking, one learns nothing from a photograph." This is the picture taken just a few hours after the birth of our child, deceptive in its immediacy and seeming transparency. I want to tell the story of this picture (before and after) - for me anyhow, there's a lot more to … Continue reading The Birth of Our Child – Introduction
My Struggle
I'm about 1,000 pages into Karl Ove Knausgaard's 6-volume, 3,600 autobiographical novel My Struggle. It's translated from the Norwegian, and in case you're wondering, the Norwegian title is Min Kamp, and yes, those words are close cognates to the title of Hitler's infamous tract. According to another piece I read, that parallel is intentional, though I've not encountered any … Continue reading My Struggle
Libertarian History Lessons
Nates began a post a few months ago as follows: Let’s start with some common ground: the failure of standard attempts to ground liberty on some pre-social free individual. I don’t buy into this way of using social contracts, for all the reasons Josh has pointed out in previous posts. Basically, it’s turtles and sociality all the … Continue reading Libertarian History Lessons
MLB Replay Review
Now that we've had a good half season or so of replay review in baseball, I'm curious what people think of it. Personally, I'm mostly happy with how it's been working, although there are obviously still some issues to hash out. For instance, I'm surprised at how often plays do not get overturned, despite what … Continue reading MLB Replay Review
Reinventing Bach (Part 2)
Part Two of a lengthy book review/summary. Part One is here. A few more figures Paul Elie's Reinventing Bach introduced me to (again, interspersed with youtube videos)... (well, it wasn't really an introduction but) Glenn Gould (1932-1982): Elie convincingly reads Gould's work as that of the first great artist to come of age in the era of recordings. His … Continue reading Reinventing Bach (Part 2)
Boyhood
Really short summary: go see this movie! Longer more thought-out review: The premise of this movie is simple: Richard Linklater filmed portions over a span of years, working with the same actors as they grew older, to create a coming-of-age narrative centering around a boy and his family. That project suggests hyper-specificity - an alternate title might have … Continue reading Boyhood
Reinventing Bach (Part 1)
Now for something hopefully less controversial. Part 1 of a lengthy review - Part 2 is here. I've been making my way through Paul Elie's Reinventing Bach for the better part of the summer. It's 500+ pages long, which initially felt a bit much for a work of popular musical history, but it's the sort of … Continue reading Reinventing Bach (Part 1)
Original Positions 