Posts by Bruce Grierson
Doing one thing over and over
In their quest for perfection, some film directors put their actors through a cosmic test of patience. David Fincher, best known for his Oscar-winning The Social Network, shot the opening scene of that picture 99 times. It’s not a record — that honour goes to Stanley Kubrick, who logged 148 takes of a scene from…
Read MoreA Horrible, Hideous No Good Very Bad Day
From time to time my congenital optimism — the emotion that underpins this whole project — gets pierced by sadness. Awful things happen. When the awfulness unfolds on a single day, you could call it a Big Day. Even though only thing “big” about it is the hole it leaves in your life. ** On…
Read MoreA Day in the Wayback Machine
Boop! The email that appears in your in-box activates brain synapses you thought had rusted shut. It’s from an old university friend you haven’t seen in decades. She found you online and, on an impulse, reached out. Turns out she’s coming through your town next month and wondering if you’re free to meet. Are you?…
Read MoreThe greatest day in rock ‘n roll history
“Truly a night to remember!” barks the record producer Sam Phillips, round midnight, as he peers across the sound room at the never-to-be repeated convergence: four supernova stars in the same room at Sun Studio in Memphis, winding up an impromptu jam session. The date: December 4, 1956. The stars: Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins,…
Read MoreA day of human reckoning
One Big Day is, by design, a sunny can-do project. Implicit is the idea that we might — really should—periodically engineer a single day where we try to make something happen. Something meaningful and lovely and maybe a little bit life-changing. But Big Days also just occur on their own. And sometimes they’re very un-lovely,…
Read MoreThe day a famous writer made one small change – which changed the artist he became
I’m not gonna lie: the American fiction writer William Gass—best known for avante-garde novels like In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, and one of the high priests of postmodernism—always eluded my tastes. (“O William Gass, you’re a pain in the ass…”) Nevertheless, I find a peculiar choice he made one day circa…
Read MoreStart Me Up: How winning a hackathon changed Max Macaro’s life
The low points in our lives can break us. Or make us. In the fall of 2014, Max Macaro, a student from small town in Siberia, was right up against it. From a young age he’d had big tech dreams. He’d learned English through a mail-order program, taught himself coding, been accepted into an accelerator…
Read MoreBig No-Sugar Day
Recently, my friend Debra Jang, who’s a certified health and life coach, launched the Five-Day No-Sugar Challenge for her clients and any interested guests. It seemed a worthy project: the addiction to refined sugar is a scourge of contemporary Western life. This stuff, at scale, is making us fat and clouding our brains and killing…
Read MoreCollege Scouting Trip
The life of every parent is shot through with an awareness that the kids will one day fly the coop. And you’ll be left rattling around in an empty nest held together with pride, melancholy and regret about how you bungled the little stuff. (All those “petty treasons we commit against the ones we love,”…
Read MoreE-BUG for a Day
Most days pass so unremarkably that one blends into the next in the compost of memory until they’re just gone. But very occasionally comes a day you never forget. Because it’s a day you’ve been dreaming of since you were a little kid. Around 6pm on October 15, Alex Bishop — a 24-year-old U of…
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