One more article about how much we need sleep, and I will scream until dawn. We must have, they all insist, at least seven hours every night. Or we will lose our minds and die. There is, no doubt, some truth in this bossy advice. But I have struggled with insomnia since […]
We all know how propaganda works, how deliberately chosen words become cogs in our war machines, whipping up certain emotions on purpose. But we forget how subtly those word choices can play out, and sometimes we cooperate unwittingly. Israel “occupied” East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights after the 1967 war, for example, […]
In 1962 Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States was published. It was truly one of those remarkable books that fundamentally changed the nature of the debate. Like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring published the same year, it managed to draw attention to a significant but largely unrecognized threat to […]
We go cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, laugh at old Road Runner cartoons (road runners being cuckoos) and coo over the von Trapp children as they sing about cuckoo clocks. Yet we shudder at the subtext of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and associate cuckoos with deception and cuckoldry. Does any creature […]
One woman buys a lottery ticket every day—even when her utilities are about to be cut off. She has already planned exactly how she will spend the money. “At least she still has her dreams,” someone murmurs, and I want to scream. Another friend whips up a new business scheme or an alternate […]
1. The Obsessed Raider of the Lost Black Ark When I was a schoolboy, Black History Month was known as Negro History Week. It was celebrated during the week of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, February 12. (I especially liked the month of February as a child because there were two national holidays: […]
Contemplating delicious frivolity, I tell my husband—who is depressed over landfills of excess clothing and its toxic incineration in a remote Chilean desert—that “we might as well fiddle while Rome burns.” “Nero did not fiddle,” Andrew replies absently. He has a penchant for rescuing misunderstood villains; he rendered both Herod and Richard […]
The “wallpaper” on my phone is a rich, lamplit shot of old leatherbound books shelved behind a spiral staircase. The plaster walls of our house are covered with bookshelves. Books have sheltered me, taught me, and given me solace my whole life. It bemuses me that more than half the people in […]
Groans of dismay over a new area code took up a huge chunk of the local news a few nights ago—even though the poll flashed at the segment’s end shows that more than 70 percent of us “don’t care.” The loyalists do. “Forever #314,” tweeted St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Aisha Sultan, and […]
It will not be long now. The garden catalogs arrive almost daily, bright and fat among thin sad bills and tax statements. From the dark of a closet, I pull the jar of black bean hyacinth seeds, snapped free of their wrinkly purplish-brown pods in December, and unscrew the lid. They are […]
