Category: How To

  • How to build a house (part 1)

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, July 10, 2016 At eight years of age, my best friend is a little girl named Minnie who lives not too far from our house on the shores of Lake Washington, in Seattle, a friend with whom I spend the majority of my days, outside, making stuff up. We make up a…

  • Dzubble dzutch

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, February 21, 2016 Dear 11-year-old self, I’m writing you a letter about jumping rope — double Dutch, to be exact. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about the last 10 years, for whatever reason. Yes, 10 years. They go by fast. I have not been cogitating on jump rope, but rather I’ve…

  • EXPLETIVE, yeah!

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, January 17, 2016 We’re at a dance party. The DJ is talented, the people have come — even on a school night — and the birthday girl is happy. At 65 years old, she has a certain amount of defiance stored up, especially when you factor in a family escape from East Germany…

  • Game on (part two)

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, November 1, 2015 Having registered for Harvard Computer Science 50, an online course famous for changing people’s lives, I left off downloading Scratch, an MIT-generated program designed to teach children fundamental computer programming. The first homework assignment takes me eight hours. I am supposed to finish the nine-week course by December 19. I…

  • Game on (part one)

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, October 18, 2015 There’s no happy ending to this story, just to let you know up front. Because in a happy ending version, I am wearing a CS50 tee shirt, my brain is slightly more encephalized (bigger) and I have successfully reinvented and rerouted myself into mini-career number six or seven or whatever…

  • Here’s what you do

    Telluride Daily Planet, Sunday, September 6, 2015 Starting with my father, I have always had people around me who knew exactly what to do in any given situation. Without a split second’s worth of hesitation, he would go about fixing or fabricating or directing anything. These processes for him were self-evident and without alternative. If you…