A City Girl In Suburbia

  Contrary to popular opinion, especially in Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the technology world and get-rich-quick startups, knowledge and information are not synonymous. Knowledge entails a more comprehensive, deeper understanding learned through in-depth study and practice over time; information, on the other hand, is simply acquired data. Knowledge is to information as an essay […]

    In Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau explains: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential        facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not when I came to die. . […]

  My formative years were spent living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan a couple of streets south of Barney Greengrass and a few blocks north of H & H Bagels and Zabar’s.  This explains a great deal about me. In fact, our home phone number and that of Barney Greengrass differed by only […]

  It is a truth locally acknowledged, and not merely an urban legend, that the rat is ubiquitous in New York City and has been for a very long time. As of 2014, there were approximately two million rats cohabiting in the same metropolis as its 8.4 million people; namely, rats comprise 24% of the […]

  I learned to drive the summer I turned eighteen so that I would have a form of identification. Since I lived in New York City, I had no particular desire or reason to drive: public transportation was pretty good, walking was enjoyable and practical, traffic in the city was terrible, New York drivers tend […]

    For the record: I do not dislike dogs. I just don’t want to own one. Regarding my position on dogs, I am a bit like those who are childless by choice, who don’t mind spending time with other people’s kids, once in a while. Over four years ago we got a dog to […]

  As a guinea pig in an NIH-funded study, I’ve recently completed eight two-and-a-half-hour sessions of Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) training to determine if practicing mindfulness decreases the intensity and duration of migraines. I have been pummeled by all-too frequent, hormonally-induced, sometimes debilitating migraines for about nine years. Though generally skeptical about mindfulness, yoga, New […]