Author Archives
In 2018 I retired from Weston High School after my 21st year teaching mathematics there. This was also my 44th year as a teacher altogether. Although I’ve retired from Weston, I haven’t retired from teaching: I still teach at Harvard’s Crimson Summer Academy each summer (this coming one will be the 18th!), and I supervise a student teacher through Simmons. For 21 years I taught at the Saturday Course in Milton, MA, and I used to serve on the board of the Dorchester Historical Society.
I read, cook, and spend a lot of time building my model railroad. For some reason I’m left with less free time than would be ideal, considering that I’m supposed to be retired, but somehow I also manage to devote time to my wife, Barbara, and to our excessive number of cats.
Larry Davidson
ljd@larrydavidson.com
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Seventeenth anniversary of my very first blog post!
Exactly 17 years ago today. That was the day when I started this blog. You can still read my very first post, which was originally on Blogger and then transferred to WordPress. I have written 2,194 posts since then, which… Read More ›
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Stephen Sondheim’s Putting it Together
Twenty-one years ago, Carol Burnett and four other actors performed a Broadway revue of Stephen Sondheim songs called Putting it Together. I didn’t get to see it on Broadway, but I just watched the filmed version on DVD, which you… Read More ›
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So you wake up one morning, blind in one eye, and soon you learn that you have a 20% chance of going blind in the other eye too…
No, it has never happened to me. And I hope not to you either. But it did happen to journalist Frank Bruni. I have just finished reading his resilient memoir, The Beauty of Dusk. Bruni’s affliction, non-arteritic anterior optic neuropathy,… Read More ›
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A quiz: why can’t you read this?
Yes, I know you can read this, namely this blog post. The question is why can’t you read the passage below this paragraph. OK, OK, so it’s not in English, but that’s not the point. It’s from the Greek Old… Read More ›
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“God created the integers…”
No, it’s not about theology. It’s about math! The title of this book, edited by Stephen Hawking, is the first half of a famous quotation from Leopold Kronecker: “God created the integers, all else is the work of man.” Actually,… Read More ›
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Don’t be misled by the name.
The Neponset Cafe is a small Japanese restaurant in Dorchester that primarily features ramen, despite the restaurant’s name—which comes from its location on Neponset Avenue, right next to Neponset Circle. (Don’t confuse it with a very different Neponset Cafe across… Read More ›
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My next challenge: (re)reading Ulysses!
Perhaps the title to this post is misleading: is it strictly correct for me to say that I am “re”reading Ulysses? Well, in a way. I like to claim that I’ve already read it one and a half times, because… Read More ›
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Revisiting Brasserie
In honor of Star Wars Day, Barbara and I returned to Brasserie for our third visit yesterday. OK, I lied. It wasn’t really for Star Wars Day (but still: May the Fourth be with you). It was for another holiday… Read More ›
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A Pop History of Asian Americans from the Nineties to Now
The title of this post is the subtitle of the book, even though it describes it perfectly. The much more cryptic title is simply Rise. This is not the kind of book you read cover-to-cover. It’s more the type you… Read More ›
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Are contractions bad? In a way, but not for the obvious reason.
Oh my. Edwin Battistella begins a recent post in the OUP blog with this sentence: A few years ago, a student dropped a linguistics course I was teaching because the textbook used contractions. Yikes, can that be true? Apparently so…. Read More ›
Learning Strategies 