Dispatches from Brookline: Home Schooling and Social Distancing IV

On Monday, March 23, 2020, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker called for the closure of all non-essential businesses and asked residents to stay in their home as much as possible: to “shelter in place.” The order went in to effect at noon on Tuesday, March 24, and it will stay in effect until noon at April … Continue reading Dispatches from Brookline: Home Schooling and Social Distancing IV →

Dispatches from Brookline: Home Schooling and Social Distancing III

In two previous posts (I, II), I described how my wife Nell, our two daughters and I were coping with social distancing and the closure of the public schools in Brookline, Massachusetts until at least April 3, 2020. Other than staying inside as much as possible, we converted our dining room into a functioning classroom … Continue reading Dispatches from Brookline: Home Schooling and Social Distancing III →

Reaching milestones of my own invention

In my last post, I described how a great friend of mine and I exchange generous Amazon gift cards for our birthdays. One gift I have already used this year’s card to purchased is this four-DVD film noir box set: Of the four titles in this no-frills set (the only extras are trailers for every … Continue reading Reaching milestones of my own invention →

The Noir of Who: Part 4

I have long been fascinated by “two worlds collided” connections between disparate things. Emblematic of that fascination has been observing the influence of classic-era film noir on the television series Doctor Who, following its resurrection in 2005. Emerging from those observations was the essay “The Noir of Who: Classic Film Noir’s Imprint on the Resurrected … Continue reading The Noir of Who: Part 4 →

The Noir of Who: Part 3

The Noir of Who: Part 2

The Noir of Who: Backstory and Part 1

Back in, I think, 8th grade English class, we read Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations. A friend of mine (whose mother would later introduce me at his wedding as “her third son”—a high compliment) was so taken with the intricate web of connections between the book’s many characters that he pulled out a piece of … Continue reading The Noir of Who: Backstory and Part 1 →

NOIR CITY 17: New heights of noir!

The streak ended at five. For a number of reasons (including having already seen 20 of the 24 films to be screened[1]), I did not attend the NOIR CITY film festival in San Francisco this year[2]. I had attended—and enjoyed immensely—each of the previous five years after attending the 2014 festival (NOIR CITY 12) on … Continue reading NOIR CITY 17: New heights of noir! →

Organizing by themes II: Film Noir

This site benefits/suffers/both from consisting of posts about a wide range of topics, all linked under the amorphous heading "data-driven storytelling." In an attempt to impose some coherent structure, I am organizing related posts both chronologically and thematically. My love of film noir has roots in my childhood (detective fiction, Charlie Chan films) and college … Continue reading Organizing by themes II: Film Noir →

Questions asked…and answered

Periodically, a fellow blogger will pose and answer random questions in the context of a “blog award nomination.” The most recent person to do so decided, with commendable egalitarianism, to threw open the question-answering door to any and all entrants, so I decided to consolidate a series of questions (and my own idiosyncratic answers) into … Continue reading Questions asked…and answered →