“Bored, I’m so bored,” Billie Eilish sings. “I’m so bored, so bored.” Were he alive, Bertrand Russell would jump to his feet to applaud her. “Boredom as a factor in human behavior has received, in my opinion, far less attention than it deserves,” he wrote in The Conquest of Happiness, published […]
Landlocked and wheezing pollen, my body misses the sea. More specifically, it misses stretching out, near naked, on wet, hard-packed sand and listening to the sea. The splurgiest vacation we ever took was to Bermuda, and that was the only time I ever wept when it was time to go home […]
New in the Associated Press Stylebook, bible for all journalists: “Avoid the terms child-free and childless other than in direct quotes essential to the story. They may be viewed as loaded or demeaning. If you must mention a newsmaker’s parental status and if it is relevant, use a neutral description such as […]
“A badly made sentence is a judgment pronounced upon its perpetrator,” wrote William Gass, “and even one poor paragraph indelibly stains the soul.” He set his course for a Platonic purity (though he was far too Baroque a soul to achieve it, his sentences jammed with clauses and effusions of metaphor and […]
For centuries, luck has been understudied. How could you study it? But pop-psych is breezing past the hesitant academics, giving us Five, Eight, Ten, even Twelve “time-tested,” “easy” “ways to increase your luck.” I send a few links to my curmudgeonly husband. You know, positive attitude, chin up, all that. He glares […]
By the Law of the Sea, no nation owns the planet’s oceans. Nor does any of us own the sun. Surely the same would be true of the colors that sun makes possible? But a piece in The Hustle drew interest all over the internet last week with its rhetorical taunt, […]
When I eased away from Roman Catholicism and then from Anglo-Catholicism, I knew what I would miss most was the stirring beauty of the rituals. Those gestures and incantations, the solemn bell, the use of fire, water, oil, and ash, touched something deep inside me. The New Agey rituals people “invented” […]
Which of these examples is current, and which is fifty years old? An elaborate system of callbacks and blindfolded trips Overseas abortifacients sold to American women Women without medical degrees training to perform abortions Homemade extraction devices using Mason jars and aquarium tubing Women drinking bleach or turpentine Criminal charges […]
Doubtless, Frederick Douglass’s famous 1852 oration, “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July” will find itself more popular this year in some quarters than it may have been in the past. The mood of the country is fraught. There is a sense that perhaps the nation is on the brink […]
Six of Washington University’s plant-science biologists are female. They travel the world easily. Not one of them, to my knowledge, has had to shear off her hair and bind her breasts to do so. That was the trick used by Jeanne Baret, a self-taught herbalist who became the first woman to […]
