Sumptuary laws astound me. Prohibiting people from lavishing money on fine foods and fabrics, when all our economy does is urge us to spend more than we earn on conspicuous consumption? We have made a twisted sort of progress. Today, we would never dream of forbidding the possession of gold and […]
“Use your words,” we tell little kids when they start to stomp or wail. “Tell me what you’re feeling,” I urge my husband. What am I feeling? I ask myself regularly, knowing that once I name an emotion, it will crawl out of my gut, where it hid and trembled, and let […]
Thirteen ways of thinking about orange • I must have watched The Godfather six or seven times since its initial release including seeing it in the theater during its opening weekend. I never paid any attention to the oranges in the film except for Brando scaring his grandson with them during his death scene. […]
Heroes, onstage in St. Louis through October 9, is a comedy. A sad comedy. Written in 2003 by a French playwright, Gérald Sibleyras, and translated two years later by Tom Stoppard. The following year it won London’s coveted Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Comedy. Set in 1959 in a home […]
In 1896, Adolph Ochs bought The New York Times and promised it would now deliver the news “without fear or favor.” For most of the following century, journalism waved the flag of objectivity as its highest standard. Soon even those who took shortcuts, fibbed, slanted, or embellished began pretending to be objective, […]
That first moonlight skinny-dip, lakewater flowing cool as satin over your skin. Sunbathing, shielded by a hedge, in the back yard, bikini top flipped down and rays of sunlight beaming into your heart. Sex outside, awkward and hasty and glorious. There is a reason that clothes meant punishment for that first […]
The bagpipes got to me; they always do. The first mournful, resonant notes carry me right out of a crowd, and all I can see is a solitary figure at the top of a hill, the plaid of his kilt softened by fog, turning his cold-misted breath into our sorrow. The […]
Even as I read an article about mind-wandering, my mind wanders away from its own topic, jolted by mild panic because I forgot to defrost the chicken breasts, seduced by the chance of crisp autumn weather next week, tempted to buy cider and spiced donuts…. Is this evidence, then, that mind-wandering helps […]
I am watching, God help me, broadcast tv. Worse, I am watching the commercials. And every last one of ’em sucks me in. I want to believe their claims; I want to order their product and own its magic. I wanted those slick copper pans, too—where have they gone? For months, I […]
My secret dream, could I travel back in time, is to be Madame de Staël in eighteenth-century Paris, hosting salons of witty, intellectually curious writers and thinkers and artists. She was not beautiful, but her conversation was luminous and seductive, pulling from her guests ideas they had not realized they were […]
