What Almost Made Me Cry Today: You

As any blogger knows, developing a relationship with one’s readers is vital. At the same time, going through the comments that readers post can be harrowing. Under cloak of Internet anonymity, will they go for your jugular? Or just your balls? Will they praise the post you put together, half hung over, one morning while …

What Almost Made Me Cry Today: Joshua Ferris Edition

“The Unnamed,” the relatively new novel by Joshua Ferris, the acclaimed author of “Then We Came to the End,” was pretty much written specifically for me. It’s about Tim Farnsworth, a well-paid lawyer who works in Manhattan, lives happily in New Jersey with his wife and daughter, and is cursed with a disease that compels …

What Almost Made Me Cry Today: Bedrooms of the War Dead

Yes, it’s an easy tearjerker, and the most cynical among us would say that it was conceived that way. But in “The Shrine Down the Hall, this weekend’s Times Magazine feature on the bedrooms left behind by kids who went to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, had me from the first photo. What we see, …

What Almost-Almost Made Me Cry Today

Once again, I find myself at 35,000 feet, tear ducts wide open and ready to drain me of any last drops of moisture in my body. Today’s in-flight movie: The Blind Side, in which Oscar™ winner Sandra Bullock adopts a quasi-homeless black friend of her young son. Will I almost-cry today? Probably not—I don’t even …