Safety Calculus

No, she insists, I never feel unsafe in the Bronx.  It’s on the Upper East Side walking alone, late at night, surrounded by drunk and entitled white men that she feels any unease.  She is aware of the coldness between 5th and Lex where no one but the occasional doorman would turn if she called [...]

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for future reference

This afternoon, I went shoe shopping with another member of the trifecta. I swore I would only buy a single pair, but wound up leaving with two (without a shopping bag and recycling the boxes). Both pairs will slide comfortably into my wardrobe. The brick red pair replaces my battered Italian bowling [...]

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temporal benchmarks

Each time I sign a new credit card, I wonder what my life will be like when it expires. Will my last name be the same? Will my address be the same? Will I be able to use a credit card where I’m living? Will my credit limit have quadrupled? [...]

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low impact girl: a six-day experiment

There’s a guy known as “No Impact Man”. You can google him to find out about his attempts to live without carbon emitting vehicles of any kind, eat food grown within a 250 mile radius of the city, use minimal electricity, use no paper and raise a daughter with his wife in some fancy [...]

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population density

I know what 104,000 people look like, I’ve been in Ohio Stadium when we’ve played Michigan. I know what 104 people look like from the day I addressed my fellow high school graduates. Even with a strong mathematical understanding of order of magnitude and the dramatic increases made when you multiply something by [...]

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from scratch

At the end of every other month, I do a bi-monthly award ceremony in my classroom for students with perfect attendance (which includes being on time, not just coming), perfect uniform wearing, and perfect homework. Each student receives a certificate printed on ordinary paper and a cupcake. In some ways this is corny, [...]

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when i grow up

I often slip into conversations the possibility that I will one day become a US President or a spy. If I was to seriously consider either of these two careers, it would make sense to talk much more about the former and much less about the latter. I realized today that I often [...]

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warning: math girl

In college, Yoshie and I decided to start The Yoshie/Ali Boyfriend School to train men who wanted to date our girl friends. This began with our dissatisfaction about one particular boyfriend of one very nice chemistry student. She eventually married a much nicer boy without any contributions from either of us. However, [...]

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in defense of grey

Grey’s Anatomy is my guilty pleasure. Those who know me well, know the many reasons that it makes no sense for me to watch the show but I do. This fall, I tried to give it up for awhile, but it didn’t last.
In many ways, I found the potential death of it’s lead [...]

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worth fighting for

“No you can’t touch the dinosaur bones!” I insisted.
“But we live in a free country.” Makil protested.
“Living in a ‘free country’ means that we have freedom of religion and speech and the power to vote to change things. Being free does not mean that you can touch the dinosaur bones,” I explained. [...]

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