At first I assumed they were just schmoozing me. The film crew had flown in from L.A. and made their way to little Waterloo, determined to ask me 110 questions about the Coleman murders so they could fill in the gaps in the experts’ comments. One more notch for print journalism, I thought […]
For proof of our young nation’s insecurity, one need go no further than the wobble of aspic. A savory jelly, properly made by boiling calves’ feet or pigs’ trotters or any other disgusting animal bit that contains a lot of collagen, aspic is most often set in a mold. Within its cool […]
Demons seem to be making a comeback. The Catholic church kept mum about its exorcisms for decades. A hush used to fall in my own family; my grandparents knew one of the strong young Jesuits who had been called upon to assist (mainly by holding the boy down) at the rites that inspired […]
I have been slightly miserable, of late. Yes, because of wanton slaughter and injustice and environmental disaster, but also for the supremely selfish reason that I want, need, more fun. It has suddenly struck me that I have worked a bit too hard my whole life long. And now—send in the clowns—I […]
I understood when women wanted become priests, CEOs, mechanics, soldiers. But incels? Ally with, or at least borrow a syllable and a few sentiments from, a surly group of involuntarily celibate men? Even the incels say it is not possible. Their reasoning? A woman is to make herself available, with gratitude, to any […]
At a party, I am trying to focus on the story somebody’s telling when the word “vagina” leaps out of a conversation in the other room, as though it had been yelled and not simply…uttered. Once, the word was never uttered. Lacking even useful euphemisms, we were reduced to waving a vague […]
At the retirement subdivision where I live in Las Vegas, there was a ceremony on Memorial Day morning 2022 in front of the community center. I had read about it in the subdivision’s newsletter and promptly forgot until Ida, my wife, and I were walking toward the center to use the fitness […]
“I studied rocks,” my friend Susan Barker likes to joke, especially when I press some inscrutable piece of contemporary poetry into her hand. In her doctoral studies, she focused on ways to get people excited about nature, and she is frustrated by all the paeans written by urban types who see a butterfly […]
Staring balefully into the bottom of an empty beer stein before he slides it toward the bartender, a stranger might—if he is on his third—tell me why he drinks. He might say he drinks because he is worried about his job, or his wife left him, or he cannot find any other […]
Disenchantment can mean many things: a resigned sigh, a thickly scabbed wound, a heartbreaking glimpse of Dad playing Santa, a marriage that replaces dinner dates and moonlight with Hamburger Helper and a toddler throwing up all night. But in sociology, disenchantment means something very specific: a cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion […]
