Author Archives: ps pirro

In “How to Stay Calm During the Pandemic,” Harvard Kennedy School professor Arthur Brooks parses the difference between risk and uncertainty, between disappointment and regret, and what happens to us when we confuse, in each case, the one for the other. I appreciate the analysis. I’m a word nerd. I’ve seen — we all haveContinue reading “The Subversive Call of Ordinary Life”

All day long I’ve been dreading the governor’s press conference, dreading the announcement that’s due any day regarding the lifting of the stay-at-home order that has shuttered my place of employment since mid-March. I’m dreading the announcement because it will force a reckoning I’d rather postpone for a little while longer: that the work I’veContinue reading ““You Should Do Carry-Out””

I’ve been talking with the young chef who works with me at the fancy coffee bar from which we are both furloughed. We’re attempting to re-conceptualize our cafe menu in light of all the changes we’re facing, trying to guess at what may emerge at some point in the future when we’re able to serveContinue reading “Everyday is Like Sunday”

So I’m thinking a lot about work these days. About what is essential and what is unnecessary, and how this pandemic has illuminated nothing so much as the absurdity of our economy, where the ones who do what most needs doing are the ones whose value is least acknowledged, least rewarded. Most anonymous. Most invisible.Continue reading “Essentials”

There are rainbows on the windows and walls of the local businesses in my little town, painted and chalked and pasted up with construction paper, a show of solidarity in a community not known for such a thing. It feels sweet and a little tentative, the town speaking with a waver in its voice, tryingContinue reading “The Long Now of Not Knowing”

On a Saturday night a little over a week ago a tornado touched down about a mile from my house. It took out a small barn, a few roofs and fences. It brought down tree limbs and a couple entire trees. No one was seriously injured, but it made a mess of my neighborhood. AsContinue reading “A Billion Bits of Randomness”

Are we cooking a little more than usual these days? This morning as I scribbled in my journal, instead of asking myself that perennial question I can never seem to answer once and for all (“What do you want to do with your one precious life?”) I asked something a little less anxiety provoking: whatContinue reading “Ramen”

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life andContinue reading “Idle”

Peter Gray on the academic kindergarten: Race to the Top; what a horrid metaphor for education. A race? Everyone is on the same track, seeing how fast they can go? Racing toward what? The top? The top of what? Education is not a race, it’s an amble. Real education only occurs when everyone is amblingContinue reading “What Idiots We Are”

My friends in Buffalo roll their eyes at how little it takes for us in the Ohio River Valley to call a snow day. A bit of ice on the roads, some flocking on the trees. This morning I looked out the window and said, “Oh, look how pretty.” And took a snow day. It’s oneContinue reading “Snow Day”