If you know me at all, then you know that this project is right up my alley. I am an avid fan of ballet. It is such a beautiful, powerful, emotionally compelling art form. I am also a serious fan of Degas’s famous ballet works. So the second I heard that Misty Copeland recreated Degas’s most famous ballet works, I had to know more. The images are compelling, and the article accompanying them here is interesting. Check it out here. (Photo: Ken Browar & Deborah Ory, from this Harpers Bazaar article)

Things That Might Go Wrong John Steffler   I was trained to be cautious: my father always there two steps ahead of my every move: “If you hold it like that it’ll slip…. Now what are you going to do with it?… I saw a guy try that once and it tore off his arm.”   But I go beyond such rote-learned caution. I am creatively cautious, exquisitely sensitive to things that might go wrong.   Quicker than any computer my mind scoots down dozens of possible turns events might take, spotting the dangers, clucking warnings automatically as a hen.   Now, lying in bed, I listen as my young daughter goes to…

Required Reading. I have a strange habit of imagining the pitch meetings for various films and television shows. Particularly the really bad ones. What could possibly have been said to convince someone that it was a good idea to make some of the bizarre things out there? What was said in the pitch meeting for Naked and Afraid, for instance? Or Sharknado? Most recently a friend and I were imagining the pitch meetings for music videos. Equally entertaining to imagine are the pitch meetings for shows that have a truly odd premise and yet somehow just work. This imagined pitch for Wishbone from Abbey Fenbert is amazing and hilarious. VISIONARY: So there’s this dog.…

As someone who knows I don’t want children, and has known as much from a fairly young age, I think about what it means to be a woman who doesn’t want children and how this impacts my life a lot. I’m at an age where the children issue is both something you confront on a daily basis — my friends are starting to have kids or discuss having kids with their partners, the ones who don’t have kids or a person with whom to have kids are starting to worry about timelines, and the question of children is actually something that arises in the dating world (and knowing you don’t want…

Required Reading. 2015 was, for my family, a year of death. I don’t know why things seem to go like this. I don’t know why death occurs in clusters. I don’t know what exactly do do with the reality of death. I don’t know how to deal with loss and grief and the looming spectre of mortality while carrying on with several jobs and daily tasks. I think about it a lot these days. I don’t mean this to sound like a cry for help; it isn’t. Life’s just been hard and weird lately. I’ve been thinking a lot about this essay by Paul Kalanithi as a result. His story is…