Posts published by “Erik S. McMahon”

Statistics Assault us constantly, and are absorbed, even ones that, on their face, seem far-fetched. Two-thirds of high-school students can’t identify the United States, handed an unlabeled map, or name combatants in the Civil War.…

I’d been to Mexico eight, maybe nine times, not counting border towns; spots like Puerto Vallarta, Manzanillo, Zihuatenejo, Oaxaca, and Cancun. I had seen the sprawling Federal District, Ciudad de Mexico, itself, only once, for…

I hadn’t ever heard “feedback,” in a musical sense, before, but the howling that kick-started the Beatles’ ‘I Feel Fine’ was an instant hit with me. This was long ago. You needed to snap molded…

It was referred to as the cellar, never called a “basement,” though I’m not sure yet I understand what distinguishes them. You could get down there either by the steep stairs leading from the pantry,…

Pale-jointed knuckles grip the wheel. Squinting, trying to detect shapes of any kind beyond your windscreen. This rates as a full-bore white-out. Zero visibility. Now you’ve lost sight of those blurred red tail-lights that were…

It's tough enough for a stage comedian to make you laugh out loud; more remarkable still when a supposedly comic movie does so. Rarest of all is an author achieving such result in print. A…

So many cubes of braised tofu, countless Hunan broccoli specials; turned out they could legitimately be written off and called research. Frequenting of Sino-American eateries, from an IRS perspective, had been strictly recreational — until…