We use cookies to improve our services and remember your choices for future visits. For more information see our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Independent, Reader-Supported Publishing
Browse Topics
Dreams
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Eat Your Dreams
The next day, while recounting the dream to my wife, I realized I had discovered the perfect diet, one that allows the dieter to feast on any food and never gain weight. The secret is to eat in your dreams.
May 2010Sy Safransky’s Notebook
February 2010
I dreamt that a beautiful stranger had fallen in love with me. The only way to find out where she lived, however, was to look her up on Facebook, which I’d steadfastly refused to join. So that’s what I get for my neo-Luddite posturing, for telling a friend yesterday that the world needs an About-Facebook.
February 2010Sy Safransky’s Notebook
October 2009
Global warming is irreversible, Lovelock says: We’ve already pushed the planet past the tipping point. Solar panels and compact fluorescents aren’t going to avert disaster. By the end of this century, he predicts, floods, droughts, violent storms, and melting polar ice caps will make most of the world uninhabitable.
October 2009
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
The Sister In Our Dreams
We knew we had a sister who was dead. Her little footprints and handprints, in black ink on a stiff piece of ocher cardboard, were hidden in a deep box above our winter coats in the room off the kitchen. Her weight and length were scrawled in blue under the tiny footprints, in our mother’s handwriting.
October 2009
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Spring Comes To New Jersey
I’ve been thinking lately about eccentricity. The word eccentric is from Greek astronomy; it describes a celestial object whose movements aren’t centered around the earth. The ancient Greeks saw the planets moving through the sky with no apparent direction and called them “wandering stars” (asteres planetai).
October 2009
Sy Safransky’s Notebook
January 2009
When the river of truth rises, when it washes over the sandbags I’ve placed around my life — for my own protection, of course — do I grieve or rejoice?
January 2009Sy Safransky’s Notebook
October 2008
My daughter Mara is getting married next week — my daughter who is in her thirties now, not her twenties; not a teen; not a young child crossing the street for the first time; not an infant I rock in my arms at 3 A.M., too tired to think straight, the sleepless nights stacked up like planes in a holding pattern, the pilots growing drowsier and drowsier. Wake up! She’s getting married!
October 2008Sy Safransky’s Notebook
February 2008
I didn’t want to go to the antiwar rally last night; I had too many things to do. But I always have too many things to do. I asked myself: Am I really too busy to exercise my right of dissent? Use it or lose it, Democracy whispered.
February 2008Quotations
Sunbeams
December 2007There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Subscribe & SaveSAVE 52%
Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
Subscribe Today