An article I wrote in April 2012 about Pete Seeger was published in the Newton Tab in the weeks leading up to a Newton Family Singers Seeger-themed concert. It’s no longer on the Tab website, and it seems appropriate to repost it here. Reading it over, the article reads a bit like an obituary. Rest…
A week or so ago, the Boston Globe Magazine published an essay I wrote about the “Sudanese Hug,” a greeting I learned while visiting that nation. There was a great response to the piece and I felt like I’ve been learning on the fly how to navigate social media (especially Twitter) as a freelance writer…
Brain, Child Magazine originally published my essay on hugging my tween son (why he needs it and how I screwed it up), and now, through a partnership, the essay has been reprinted in the Huffington Post HuffPost Parents section here. Nice to see the story continues to resonate with readers.
What’s more than a handshake and less than a hug? The Sudanese have the answer. From the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine (1/12/14): Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you the Sudanese hug. While working on an archeological excavation in northern Sudan, I was fascinated by a form of greeting I had never seen…
Dear Jack Chengs, I’m not currently looking for a software job in Southern California. Are you? If so, you may want to redirect that Monster job search listing to your own e-mail. Jack Cheng in the Midwest, please thank your friends for all the invitations to church potlucks. I will be unable to attend. Similarly…
I just finished reading Succeeding When You’re Supposed To Fail: The 6 Enduring Principles of High Achievement by Rom Brafman. So much of it deals with issues of parenting and teaching non-traditional students (which I do at the Clemente Course), that I thought I would take some time to summarize the book for myself and…
My latest essay published by Brain, Child Magazine is about why my 10 year old son needs hugs and how I screwed that up: My 10-year-old son can be a train wreck. I know it’s not his fault. His limbs are growing faster than he knows, and his brain is all over the place, from the…
Comic Sans roundup! Ironically, Blogger does not allow me to use the font here. But you know it. Turns out Comic Sans was developed at Microsoft using two of the biggest selling comic books of the late 1980s: The Dark Knight Returns (lettered by John Constanza) and Watchmen (lettered by Dave Gibbons). Here’s the Urban…
Earlier this year, I worked on an excavation in northern Sudan. The most amazing thing we found were a couple of rock-cut rooms in a mortuary temple a hundred yards from the pyramids of the royal cemetery. In the rock-cut rooms, there were columns, and in one of them, capitals of unusual design. My contribution…
I’ve been a regular blogger for the local singing group my family belongs to, the Newton Family Singers. I play guitar and other instruments, too. For that blog, I write about songs — their origin, stories about their composition, arrangement and interpretation. Some of my favorite posts: Seven Bridges Road If I Had a Boat…
Jack Cheng, PhD 