My son was the only young person in the physical-therapy facility almost in Texas. The elderly were being led back and forth by cables rolling over pulleys. They stepped up and down on machines that went nowhere, turned circles with their feet but did not move. I was having ghost…
It is not a great time in the United States to say you believe in writing, reading, and books, but let me be a brave little culture warrior and proclaim that, along with having…
I was slow to let my sons play video games with violence in them—freakishly slow, if you ask them, proving how out-of-touch I am with the hip, modern world. (Also: “Hip” is a gross word that old people use; please never say that again.) When they were younger it did…
I got my first email from the President of the United States on February 1st of this year, on the eve of his second State of the Union Address. “Nancy & Chuck don’t want me to speak, Mainstream Media outlets don’t want me to speak, and the Hollywood Elites don’t want…
In case you missed it, as I did, here is a list of specific Department of Defense projects deferred at the start of September in order to build $3.6 billion of additional primary and secondary “pedestrian fencing” on our border with Mexico. On September 3, Secretary…
With the possible exception of Walt Whitman, no other writer has given the foundational matter of love and democratic life in America such probing attention.
Baldwin’s closeness to his nephew, and the hope and great sadness housed within that bond, reminded me of my connection to my youngest niece. Both bookish. Both black. Both broke.
Apparently, Jimmy had been given an advance of $100,000 for If Beale Street Could Talk with the promise of another $200,000 on completion. I gathered that he was anxious to get it done. It seemed as if he needed the seclusion of this special place to write about the tragic life of black Americans.
We have always had much more than our simple notions of who we are and what this world has made us. For Americans, Baldwin pushes us towards the “hard to bear.”