When T.S. Eliot came to dinner at the Woolfs’ house and read them his new poem, The Waste Land, “He sang it & chanted it & rhymed it,” Virginia wrote. “It has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I’m not so sure. One was […]
The classic vices are sexier, more noir, but I can wallow in color and feel like I have thrown back a fifth of bourbon. Clicking away from the latest streaming sensation without a second thought, I watch, breathless, a presentation from WGSN (the world’s leading consumer trend forecaster) on the new […]
Christmas and Hanukkah are all about light. Fortified, I go back to puzzling over the darkness. What, for example, reduces an intelligent, wealthy aristocrat to torturing servant girls, sometimes tearing off chunks of their flesh with her own teeth? We fuss over Dahmer and Bundy, but Erzsebet Báthory’s murder count is […]
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” so said Ralph Emerson. Those who are wisely inconsistent remind us of this quote as we marvel at the grandeur of their twists and turns. Of course, these people are not likely to have ever read anything by Emerson or even to offer the title of […]
Another article on all the anxiety and depression triggered by the pandemic. I sigh. The articles themselves are depressing and anxiety inducing. Skimming with one finger on the delete button, I hesitate at a word: “surprisingly.” Reading more slowly now, I register this: “Surprisingly, two previous studies found that neuroticism decreased […]
I once heard a Hallmark creativity czar give a presentation about productivity in which he emphasized the peril of “false endings.” You know them: those glorious moments of self-deception when you decide, “I’m almost done!” and the angst begins to dissipate. Your muscles unclench, and you taste sweet leisure on the […]
“What is buccal fat how are they still inventing new flaws for us,” tweeted Jules Zucker after she saw the latest celeb cosmetic surgery trend. Responding to one of the 100,000 likes and comments, she wrote, “I am literally running out of limbs and features.” The New York Times picked up […]
The news broke last month. Sight and Sound, the British Film Institute’s magazine, published its famous once-a-decade list of the hundred best films. And Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles had bumped Hitchcock’s Vertigo from the top spot. “Such a sudden shake-up,” the BFI marveled. (Jeanne Dielman, made in […]
Life moves from softness to constriction, then back again. Babies are swaddled in flannel, dressed in soft cotton shifts that slide right over their downy heads. Then, little by little, life becomes uncomfortable. First the tight plastic pants, then the zips and buttons and layers. Long, itchy pants and awkward tights. Bras […]
The atheist is my friend Susan Barker, a naturalist and science teacher who has been skeptical about the God stuff since she was five years old. Me, I am an agnostic soaked in Roman Catholicism, rinsed in Episcopalianism and toweled off by Taoism. We are talking about the meaning of life—at least, […]
