Category: Uncategorized

In my blog last month I mentioned that the new publicist for Wildhouse Publishers wanted to promote the parenting angle of my book, The Ping Pong Player and the Professor. Despite my parenting experience, four times over, I’m certainly not a parenting expert, so I was skeptical. But the new publicist is persistent and I…

Wildhouse Publications recently hired a new publicist. I don’t know what happened to the previous publicist, but she apparently resigned shortly after the publication of The Ping Pong Player and the Professor. We hadn’t been in contact for quite some time so I assumed she had simply given up on me, which, incidentally, I thought…

Before I get to my main topic, there are two things I’d like to mention. First, in my April blog I wished Will Shortz a speedy recovery from his recent stroke. I had also written that his stroke ended his “playing streak of nearly 4000 consecutive days.” Although my last blog pushed for USATT to…

I’m sorry for the blogging lapse. Teaching, traveling, feeling worn down (from the aforementioned teaching and traveling), losing myself in engaging books and mesmerizing jazz recordings, rubbing Goldberry’s belly, filling my belly with ash reshteh (courtesy of one of my graduate students), and so forth—as I’ve written elsewhere, I have no shortage of excuses. So,…

Trust me, nobody has ever confused me for Spock. But I’ve co-opted the title of Leonard Nimoy’s first autobiography for the title of this blog because I’ve recently been thinking a lot about human illogicalities and incongruities. Nimoy himself was not immune to such inconsistencies. In a move of incomparable irony, he followed up I…

First things first. I apologize for the absence of a December blog. Skipping December was not something I had originally planned when I decided to try my hand at monthly blogging. But as any academic will tell you, closing out a semester is hectic business, especially for the disorganized, and of my many shortcomings, disorganization…

I had a surprisingly lovely Thanksgiving holiday. Yes, surprising. Before the holiday I was feeling anxious. I had no particular reason to feel anxious, just a lifetime of observation that when you bring lots of genetically-related kin together, something invariably goes wrong. Oddly, my evolutionary biology classes always suggested a different dynamic among those who…

I had intended for this month’s blog to be about Eliel’s travels in China over the summer. I was planning to share a few of his stories and make some connections between anthropological research on pilgrimage, which I find fascinating, and Eliel’s explorations of table tennis’s epicenter on this planet. Eliel was in China as…

Last year I began conducting research at a table tennis club. In hindsight, developing and carrying out this research was one of the best decisions I’ve made in quite a while. Okay, admittedly, my children would likely note that competition within the category “Daddy’s Good Decisions” is rather thin. Regardless, the plan to pursue this…

Throughout the world, people, places, and things can become polluted. I don’t mean polluted in the sense of becoming smoggy, soiled, or splattered with your toddler’s unwanted supper. Rather, I mean impure or contaminated. Desacralized. Like cooties, albeit for adults. For example, on an atoll in Micronesia where I conducted fieldwork, the highest chief possessed…

Are all Uber drivers more interesting than the rest of us, or just my Uber drivers? I guess I shouldn’t speak for the rest of humanity, but Uber drivers are certainly more interesting than I am. I’ve always wondered whether wannabe Uber drivers have to pass a series of exams that assess the extraordinariness of…