Instead of watching with vigilance for a stacked-stone wall or an S-curve or a white church steeple, I respond to robotic voice commands. It is a state of mind that turns me inward, disconnecting me from the land even as I move across it.
About seventy-five percent of all compliments are about appearance, with only five or six percent falling into categories of performance, ability, taste, or possessions. Why are we so shallow and unimaginative?
Shakespeare wanted us to struggle with an inscrutable villain. With evil itself. Our age equates evil with psychopathy, pointing to a physiological absence of the brain structures and biochemicals that give us empathy.
“Check in on your single friends,” freshly elected Vice President Kamala Harris urged last Thanksgiving. Five simple words, but behind them a sea change in how we organize our common lives.
Nothing is as simple, as pure, or as absolute as we want it to be. And there is intrigue and rich meaning in all these layers we cover over.
There is strength in bitchiness. Which takes me to the root of my aversion: Why, in women, was (and is) strength equated with meanness?
Freak Power: The Ballot or the Bomb is a brief portrait of a brilliant young writer, frustrated with his local and national governments, applying his beliefs to the practice of grassroots politics instead of keeping to the commentariat. For any young writers who wish to “write like Hunter S. Thompson,” or fans who love the Johnny Depp portrayal, the documentary will be instructive.
In almost any period in the past fifty years, Schottenheimer could have been cast as the “square” dad in a situation comedy. He was the quintessence of matter-of-factness, the earnest striver whose word was always good, but who would not have known the latest dance moves—or even the name of the latest dance. Marty Schottenheimer exhibited a strain of cheerful seriousness or serious good cheer, take your choice.
The woman who began her career as a fashion model for Ebony and Jet magazines, who married (and divorced) jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, and whose love of Black people, especially Black women, made her into an activist for most of her long, long life developed her craft so exactingly that she reigns as one of the greatest artists America has ever produced (or ever will produce).