Author Archives
In 2018 I semi-retired by retiring from Weston High School after my 21st year teaching mathematics there. This was also my 44th year as a teacher altogether. In 2023 I retired fully, adding in my 18 years at Harvard’s Crimson Summer Academy each summer. For 21 years I had 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 varying number of cats (once up to six, but now sadly down to one).
Larry Davidson
ljd@larrydavidson.com
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The Best Book of the Year!
Yes. I know. How can I honestly say “best book of the year” when the year isn’t even half over yet? Furthermore, of course, I can judge only the books that I’ve read. So, let me rephrase. Of the 17… Read More ›
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Sardinian. (No, it’s not the language that sardines speak.)
Your second guess will probably be that Sardinian is a dialect of Italian spoken on the island of Sardinia, so maybe it really is related to sardines, since you suspect that Sardinia was named after the many sardines that are… Read More ›
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As promised, Via Cannuccia!
A mere week and a half after opening day, Barbara and I finally got to have dinner at Via Cannuccia, which is small (maybe 30 seats), very Italian, and absolutely delicious. Warm and welcoming too, it’s clearly destined to be… Read More ›
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13 Quirky Stories
I have written about the fascinating author Helen DeWitt four times over the past eleven years: They say that third time is the charm, but what about the fifth time? Well, the verdict is mixed. DeWitt’s short story collection, Some… Read More ›
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Tavolo again, Via Cannuccia soon
Now that Ashmont Grill is no more 😢, our closest local restaurants are Tavolo and Via Cannuccia. Barbara and I haven’t been to Via Cannuccia yet (it just opened), but we had dinner at Tavolo last night. As usual, the… Read More ›
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Is this a conventional Christie? Just suspend judgment until the convention is over…
In her novel The Christie Caper, author Carolyn Hart pays explicit and implicit homage to Agatha Christie. As you would expect, she does it with panache. Clearly Hart loves and admires Christie. To enjoy this book you don’t need to… Read More ›
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Forming Our Future
Eight months ago I wrote a post about our first attempt at interdisciplinarity at the Crimson Summer Academy. It was a start. Perhaps even a good start, but still no more than a start. This summer we are keeping the… Read More ›
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NSFW
Don’t leave this book—Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide—lying around casually at work. Your boss might get the wrong idea. Now that it’s safely on your night table at home, or on the end table next to your… Read More ›
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How well does ChatGPT do when it tries to talk about Trump and Greek literature/mythology?
“Write a short essay comparing Donald Trump and Admetus.” That was the prompt I gave ChatGPT, just to see how it would handle a presumably unfamiliar topic. I’ll show you the essay in a minute, but first I should remind… Read More ›
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A Jewish student at a (thinly disguised) Ivy League college in the ’90s
If you’ve read My Last Innocent Year, you quickly figured out that it’s meant to be Dartmouth, right? Yes, it’s subtly called Wilder College, but it’s described as an elite college in New Hampshire that used to be all male… Read More ›
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Daffodils, supervised by neighborhood cat
Look closely…
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Kapow
A few months ago I observed that we now have three Thai restaurants along Dorchester Avenue between Lower Mills and Fields Corner! The oldest of these closed briefly a few months ago and recently reopened under new management with a… Read More ›
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The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling
That’s the title of a seven-episode podcast about the attacks on J.K. Rowling from both the left and the right—originally from the right but now mostly from the left. Personally I think that both groups of critics are wrongheaded and… Read More ›
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Which trig is which?
A friend of mine claims to have had a bad experience with trigonometry in high school. Is this because she had a bad teacher? (Most people blame their teacher.) Or is it because she was a bad student? Or is… Read More ›
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Which do we want, democracy or fascism? Pick one. (Wait…isn’t this supposed to be a book review?)
Jo Walton claims to be an optimist. So does Margaret Atwood. Keep that in mind while reading their dystopian novels. If you take the long view, you can see what they mean, but it’s all too easy to imagine that… Read More ›
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S&W, Take Two
Exactly a month ago I published a review of Smith and Wollensky in this blog. It was based on a single visit, and it was definitely not a 5-star review. More like a 3.5, and that was apparently not satisfactory… Read More ›
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Not a cat chair
If you think about the word cathedral—as one does—you imagine that it must have originally meant “cat chair,” since you know that hedra is ancient Greek for “chair.” Right? Well, not exactly. But now, at least, you want to read… Read More ›
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One Hour Photo
Not your typical Robin Williams movie, One Hour Photo is an intense psychological thriller. Most of it takes place in a fictional big-box store called SavMart, which I first thought was supposed to be Target but eventually was clearly WalMart…. Read More ›
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Are you really saying that they mistaught me—not just in one but in two courses in 11th grade?
They taught it once. They taught it twice. They taught it thrice. So, in the well-known (or perhaps no longer so well known) words of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (definitely better known as Lewis Carroll), it must be true: “Just the… Read More ›
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The English understand wool.
Helen DeWitt is one of my favorite authors. That’s what I decided after reading her first novel! Actually I decided it at the halfway point. She may be one of my favorites, but she has never achieved true popularity; she’s… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 