I was raised by Italian-American parents. At our house, every Sunday dinner was a multi-course extravaganza. Family and neighbors and friends sat down to a table laden with pasta, meatballs, chicken, salad, vegetables…. Meals at our house were all about overabundance, just as in all the popular movies where the Italian mother puts food on the table and hollers, “Mangia!” I…
The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is currently presenting Soundings: A Contemporary Score, its first major survey of sound-based art. Most of the artworks combine both sound and visual components, but some are pure audio with nothing to see at all. As I walked through the exhibition, I began to consider and categorize the types of sounds…
I grew up in a home that was within earshot of railroad tracks. As a young boy, I had a fanciful notion about what the sound of the choo-choo going by meant. I thought the train was rising in the air and taking off like an airplane as the pitch went higher, then landing out of town as the pitch…
Certain types of sounds have therapeutic value, especially for alleviating anxiety. In a study commissioned by Spotify, the digital music service, anxiety psychologist Dr. Becky Spelman of the Private Therapy Clinic in London and her research team investigated music’s ability to relieve anxiety, especially flight anxiety. Here is Spotify’s playlist, Calming Music to Fly To, based on Dr. Spelman’s research:…
As I prepare for the coming school year, I’m planning lessons and looking forward to seeing new faces in my classroom. But something that happened over the summer is also on my mind. Our nation’s bifurcated reaction to the tragedy of Trayvon Martin’s death and George Zimmerman’s subsequent acquittal cries out for each of us to rethink race, youth, guns,…
If you’ve been visiting Rewire Me regularly, you know we’ve been focusing on stress this month. As it happens, I’ve had a very busy month, filled with hosting a dinner party for 30 people and a workshop for 15, along with the responsibilities of my job, being a mom, and the usual household upkeep. Drawing from the articles we’ve been…
The scenario for driving my cousin to JFK Airport for a flight to Finland seemed doomed from the start. I was a newly licensed driver making my first venture away from low-traveled suburban roads in New Jersey. It was excessively hot and hazy even for August in New York City, and the car had no AC. No map in the…
Odi et amo: I hate and I love, wrote the poet Catullus. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior: I don’t know why, but I feel it happening and it tortures me. Last month, I wrote about the brain’s so-called “hate circuit,” which isn’t a switch that turns hate on or off, but a set of brain structures that are activated…
I slouched my 5-foot-8-inch frame into Greg’s office weighing a mere 108 pounds. Power posture? Definitely not. But I had yet to learn about that. For the previous year I’d been battling an undiagnosable illness that had doctors all over Manhattan scratching their heads: An adverse reaction to an antibiotic had catapulted my body into a complete meltdown. With liver,…
