Here’s a bone-chilling feature in Wired last week about the increasing number of articles being written by software.  Narrative Science is a company that specializes in turning data into story.  This works particularly well in sports stories, where it will be… Read full post »

 

Allright, I’m ready to call it. If the 90s was the decade of the brain, and the 2000s, the decade of impossible to categorize millennial upheaval, this decade is going to be the decade of digital literacy. Or at least that’s what it should be.

When I say… Read full post »

Last week my eleven-year-old son’s yahoo mail account was hacked.  Ben’s on Facebook and doesn’t e-mail very much, so fortunately his list of contacts was small.  Because he doesn’t have any bank accounts or credit cards, I guess I’ve procrastinated explaining
… Read full post »

Bonjour, Monsieur Bot.

Learning code is hot. It’s the new French. Parlez Vous Python? The New York Times asked recently as it announced the new trend among millenials. Young adults who used to take night courses in foreign languages, are now taking courses in Ruby, Python and J… Read full post »

 

 

 

On January 5, I made a whimsical New Year’s resolution.  Like the other roughly 400,000 people who signed up to Codecademy’s Code Year challenge, I decided I would make 2012 the year I would learn how to code.

Usually New Year’s resolutions… Read full post »

My dad, smoking on TV. April 29, 1970. Les Archives de Radio-Canada, Sociétè Radio-Canada. 

I recently discovered a 1970 television clip of my dad on a Montreal political panel discussing the birth of the separatist Parti Québècois. Of course he’s smokin… Read full post »

A therapist once said to me that people come to therapy mostly just looking for a new reason to blame their parents. Once they've found it they usually quit. The real work of therapy only starts then when you discover that holding your parents responsible for your problems really doesn’t solve… Read full post »

As much as I’ve been anticipating the Sunil finale all week, I’ve also been dreading it. All season I’ve been resenting how our prejudices towards Sunil, the dark skinned stranger from a complex vaguely understood country, have been exploited and manipulated. I’ve grown fond o… Read full post »

It’s hard to tell what’s true with Jesse.  He meets one of Paul’s patients in the waiting room and lies to her, telling her that he’s from Milwaukee, and that he’s here to celebrate his birthday with his uncle Paul.  In Paul's office  he sings happy birthd… Read full post »

Paul is surprised to see Julia in the waiting room. “You obviously weren’t expecting to see the wicked, insensitive daughter-in-law,” she says bitterly.  Paul notices she has a bandage on her arm.  This, says Julia, is from an argument in which Sunil pushed her, she lost h… Read full post »

As I suspected, Paul’s casual discussion of Max in his therapy session with Jesse a couple of weeks ago has had unfortunate consequences.  It’s encouraged Jesse to feel like part of the family, which may be why he feels entitled to impulsively show up at Paul’s apartment at 10:… Read full post »

Tonight there are no glimpses into Paul's life. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe so that we can start the Adele session on the same sexually charged note it ended last week? Or maybe because Paul’s problems will seem pretty inconsequential next to Sunil who is going increasingly mad with… Read full post »

It's raining hard outside Paul's office. Real hard. 

Poor Jesse. He's been working so steadily on getting everyone to abandon him and now he’s practically drowning in love. Roberto's been helping him with his math homework (like Paul helped Max earlier in the week). Marissa's gone into a… Read full post »

Week four opens with Paul helping Max with his homework. Patiently he explains the simple genius of Pythagorean theory (that the square of the hypotenuse is the sum of the square of each of the remaining two sides.)  Max gets it. Father and son connect. It would seem that the Weston… Read full post »

This week we've seen Paul off his game. He pushes Sunil too far too fast. He’s asleep when Frances arrives for her appointment and confuses her with her sister. With Jesse he makes his worst mistake of the week, not just as a therapist, but also as a father. He tries… Read full post »

Sunil has been watching “Survivors” (sic). As he explains to Paul over tea, this is a show about “two groups of American citizens” who willingly endure hardship and humiliation while women walk and jump “around naked. Almost naked, practically naked, without being naked.… Read full post »

In Paul's final session with Gina he'd just met Wendy, and was optimistic about having met a woman with whom me might talk about something other than therapy, "like a book!" As we learn tonight Wendy is pretty much over. Not really because Paul is worried about how it will affect… Read full post »

One of the major challenges of dramatizing therapy is that people typically start it with a dull, rigid little story they've been telling themselves for years (my mother was an over controlling hag, my father was perfect, except for his alcoholism, etc.) As a result the average patient, at least in… Read full post »

Remember yesterday, when I said I suspected "In Treatment" without the original Israeli scripts would probably be much less confrontational? Ya, so, I’m officially taking that back now.

For the first time in the history of the show Paul has actually said to a patient "don't speak to me like that
…

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This season “In Treatment” sets out on its own without the original scripts from “Be Tipul,” the Israeli series that, despite its popularity, only lasted two seasons.

I’m going to miss living therapy vicariously though hyper confrontational Israelis.  In Canada, we… Read full post »

“There had always been something not quite right about the Berglunds.” This is the general consensus among the Berglunds' former neighbours when, long after they’ve moved, Walter Berglunds' name suddenly re-surfaces in an unfavourable New York Times feature.

Freedom is Jon… Read full post »

So here we are at the finale of the most disturbing, violent, possibly nihilistic show on television right now. As we were all expecting, there has been a whole mess of blood, guts, burning and torture.  But sadly we must say goodbye to…. uh…wait, let me re-check my notes here&hell… Read full post »

“You know I love you more when you’re cold and heartless” says Eric tenderly to Pam. It’s a lovely moment, like Casablanca starring vampires. And it’s the first time in a few episodes that Eric has been something more than, as Russell puts it “just a lump of muscle… Read full post »

“I’m a fairy?  That is so fucking lame!”

Sorry, what’s that Sookie? Oh right, you have a secret that we’ve been waiting to find out for three seasons. Cool.  But do you mind if we cut back to Nan and Russell first? Because I still have so many questions from la… Read full post »