This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for all the smart folks out there writing about writing. Back in a much earlier life I briefly studied photography, and one of my favorite practitioners was a guy named Duane Michals. If your idea of great photography is precision of structure, perfect lighting and gorgeous darkroom technique, a la Ansel […]
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Just Call Me The Woman With the Hammer
You know the saying, “To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail?” It came to mind last week when I was at the Working Mother Work Life Congress, an annual conference built around the release of the magazine’s famous “100 Best Companies” list. Sure, people were there to talk about work-life, but […]
Exercising Your Metaphor Muscle
My niece recently spent a few weeks in South Korea, sending home evocative missives about her travels. In one email, she likened a short, uncomfortable flight she took to an island to being shot out of a slingshot. She kept the metaphor alive paragraphs later, when she described the return trip: “it was sad to […]
Truth and Consequences
Watching the Democratic Convention a couple weeks ago, I was reminded of the thin line between promotion and hype. This is not a partisan blog. If I sound like I might be about to pick on the Democrats, it’s only because their situation got me thinking. Consider. They are the party of the incumbent president […]
What I Learned Over Summer Vacation
I’m just back from three weeks of travel in Italy with my family. It was hot, it was touristy, it was expensive. We had a great time. I had planned that I wouldn’t work during this time, and mostly I didn’t. But, as keeps happening, my work found me, and I realized the lessons I […]
Killing the Monsters
On the whole, I don’t believe in synonyms. Such is the magnificent complexity of the English language that only rarely do two words mean exactly the same thing. Even if the dictionary gives two words the same definition, they almost never carry the same connotation, which is what makes using the thesaurus such a treacherous […]