There is some irony in my daughter’s latest digital art project being written up in Slate. I know that. But proud dad’s gotta blog, right? Hilarity generally ensues when Lissa and I try to explain Nora Reed’s digital art to members of our own generation:   "It's a robot. That tells jokes. Kinda like if …

Continue reading ‘@thinkpiecebot’ »

It was free iris (and a little cactus) day today at the Lissa Heineman Garden and Art Emporium. The garden, a project of 20-plus years’ duration, has come to be Lissa’s best work of art (at least that’s what I think), a constantly evolving thing that is great in part because it will never be …

Continue reading ‘Lissa’s iris and cacti, in the manner of Johnny Appleseed’ »

My daughter’s got a smart and also hilarious new project involving video games and feminism and goats: Goats are not restricted by human morality. Crashing into a party onto a jetpack and setting oneself and half the guests on fire is not done with malice when it is done by the protagonist-goat of Goat Simulator; …

Continue reading ‘You might want to read Barrl’ »

When I was a youngster, which was a very long time ago, a guy named Ed Helminski took me into his journalistic embrace. Ed had a business model that involved smart coverage of the U.S. nuclear enterprise, and he made that model work at a time when journalistic models were faltering all around us. His …

Continue reading ‘Always with the hat’ »

There’s an easy grace in spending a warm spring Friday afternoon with my partner of more than 30 years, looking at things we’ve looked at a million times before.