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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Written in the South Pacific during World War II
This is a poem written by my dad in 1943 while he was serving in the U.S. Army in the South Pacific — not in Tahiti unfortunately, but in New Guinea in this case. During most of the war, however,… Read More ›
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Baskerville!
Four years ago I wrote a post about the Baskerville typeface, Of course my post had to be titled The Font of the Baskervilles; I had no choice. And now we have an entire book called Baskerville, subtitled The Biography… Read More ›
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The Law of Innocence
You’re wondering why Mickey Haller, the eponymous Lincoln Lawyer, would choose to represent himself. He even quotes the maxim that my father happens to have taught me when I was 11 years old or so: “He who represents himself has… Read More ›
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Abigail supervising her domain from on high
“Hmmm… I want to learn music theory,” says Abigail, “but I’m not sure how to do that. Maybe I can do it by sitting on top of the bookcase, right above some music books, while I gaze over my domain.”… Read More ›
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Bye bye Mark Z.
My Facebook account is going away, effective 24 hours from now. Find me on BlueSky at https://bsky.app/profile/ljdljd.bsky.social or by email at davidson.larry@gmail.com Bye bye Mark Z.
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City Unseen
City Unseen: New Visions of an Urban Planet is an amazing collection of 100 annotated images by Karen C. Seto and Meredith Reba. Is it a collection of artistic images, you ask, or is it a collection of maps? Art… Read More ›
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The Guest List
Despite having multiple viewpoint characters (a practice I’m not usually fond of), Lucy Foley’s The Guest List is both absorbing and easy to read. It is definitely the sort of book where you should not read reviews ahead of time,… Read More ›
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Abigail: A better photo
Abigail complained that the photo I posted a few days ago did not make it clear that she is a beautiful princess, so I took a better picture right now while she sat on her royal purple blanket:
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Welcome to your forever home, Abigail!
Five days ago, timid little Abigail met us at MSPCA/Angell and agreed to adopt us. From an all-time high of six cats to a low of one cat, we had now been completely catless for nearly three months at that… Read More ›
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Overboard
Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski series has been going on forever — or so it seems. Actually it’s been 43 years now, but that’s practically forever in the publishing world. After reading the earliest dozen or two, I started to get… Read More ›
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A close-up view of Neighborhood #3, The ’Burbs
This month’s exploration of my model railroad layout is our third look at an individual neighborhood of Rose City. Back in the 1940s some developers noticed that there was a lot of still undeveloped property just north of PowerTown. Clearly… Read More ›
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Men can say no.
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Polostan
Of course I knew that I had to read Polostan as soon as I saw that the author was Neal Stephenson. His 19 previously published novels are all IMHO first-rate — ranging from 1984’s The Big U to 2021’s Termination… Read More ›
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Dylan
Like Bob Dylan himself, the new biopic A Complete Unknown has generated a lot of controversy. So I had to go see it yesterday, sitting in a comfy seat in a Dorchester movie theatre surrounded by hundreds of Dylan fans…. Read More ›
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Wherever you go, there’s always someone Jewish.
These days, if you just see the title, you probably worry that the song is going to be some antisemitic diatribe on X/Twitter. But 25 years ago that wouldn’t have been your first impression; you would correctly have thought that… Read More ›
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What was the 2024 Word of the Year?
Time’s up! Now that 2024 is over, what do you think was the Word of the Year (WOTY)? Actually, there are many possibilities, largely because many different organizations determine their own answer to that question. But you should first ponder… Read More ›
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Say “Happy new year!” in 27 languages, won’t you?
That’s Afrikaans, Basque, Breton, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Latvian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Welsh, of course. https://youtu.be/iygnwZoxNHw
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The traditional mid-day Christmas dinner…
…at Chau Chow today: Yum, yum!
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The Good Detective
Sometimes you just have to trust your instincts. I had checked out a copy of The Good Detective from the library on the strength of the review in the New York Times, which said this: John McMahon is one of… Read More ›
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Accidence Will Happen
The title is a pun — but it makes sense only if you know what linguists mean by the word “accidence.” Despite that limitation, Accidence Will Happen is very much a book for the general educated reader, not for the… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 