“She lived as if the gospel were true.” —Daniel Berrigan¹ Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness², was placed in my hands fifty years ago by Daniel Berrigan, Jesuit poet and prophet of nonviolence. Fresh from federal prison for burning draft files as a protest against the U.S. war in Vietnam, he […]
In November 1989, the world watched with disbelief as the Berlin Wall fell. In America, we followed one breathless report after another about the end of communism, and we speculated about the rise of democracy in Eastern Europe and perhaps even the Soviet Union. Fortified by an attitude of triumphalism and optimism, the […]
Norman Rockwell died forty-three years ago today. As a visual storyteller he had few peers, and his timing was good, too. His lifespan (1894-1978) tracked the rise and fall of illustrated magazines with striking precision. The fusty family house magazines like Harper’s Monthly, Century, and Scribner’s Magazine began to give way to cheaper, […]
On November 2, 1963, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated, the victim of a military coup. Twenty days later U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in what was apparently another coup, although it remains unclear who wanted it and why. This is clearly what Malcolm X was referring […]
On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, I make this heretical pronouncement: Peter Jackson’s cinematic Lord of the Rings trilogy is better than J.R.R. Tolkien’s literary one. And I say so without embarrassment, no matter how many cultural pedants deem it unthinkable for a literature professor to suggest that the movies are better […]
The dining room at the Ritz-Carlton was subdued, silverware’s clink muffled by all that fine white linen, and conversations were conducted in low, cultured, carefully modulated voices. Temple Grandin’s interruption rang out like an emergency announcement, drawing amused stares as she bluntly informed the waiter of her requirements. I was young enough to […]
On October 27, 1964, Ronald Reagan went from being a former B-movie actor to a rising political figure by giving a speech in support of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. The speech is called “A Time for Choosing,” although in conservative movement circles it is simply referred to as “The […]
A tiny, gnarled apple tree, its trunk curved. A foot-tall banyan tree, holy as a relic. Horror vies with love. I want one of these bonsai trees. Every leaf, every strip of bark is perfect. Enchanted, they belong to a fairy world. Each has two ages, one counted from a […]
Once you have seen it, seen even a photo of it, you will be haunted by it. And maybe that is what it was: a haunting. The demonveggen, or Demon Wall, covers a limestone archway in a small church in Sauherad, in southern Norway. I cannot do better than the Atlas Obscura description: […]
Above the treetops and pitched roofs of our clean, sweet little town, a giant bobble sits atop stilts. I see it from our window, and I would not blame beer-soaked teenagers if they climbed up (careful, though!) to adorn the thing with graffiti. Anything would be an improvement. Now Waterloo (its name rendered a pun […]
