The word “feminine” is seldom feminist. But I chose it deliberately, because Fortuny’s dress frees the body to be both elegant and erotic. He did not throw us into a well-tailored pantsuit. Instead, he and Negrin made a dress that required no undergarments, and they did so in a corseted and slipped Edwardian era that refused to trust the female body to be itself.
Washington University political science professor Betsy Sinclair co-authored a study that found angry partisans more likely than non-angry partisans to become so socially polarized, they would refuse to help an out-partisan neighbor or avoid a conversation with one. This kind of negativity spreads like a noxious gas, and it becomes easier to insult, vilify, wish the other dead.
Wilde’s solution to work was machines, and they did make life easier. AI will make a lot of life easier, too. But many of us—if we are lucky enough to still be employed—will shift from doing work to making sure it gets done, updating and downloading and programming and monitoring and double-checking. All of which is far more stressful than doing the work itself.
All the Young Men became my equivalent of Burt Lancaster’s The Flame and the Arrow, the Black boy’s fantasy movie about an impossibly heroic person, an impossibly competent person, who fights for king and country. Poitier’s character made me proud to be an American, made me feel as if I was an American without any hesitation or crippling doubt.
My packaging was not exactly sexy. That streamlined Old English font would have better served a book of Christmas carols. Also, I was darker than the competition, in a racist country, and less sweet, in a country seduced by sugar.
Parents used to lecture their kids to clean their plates because little children in Africa were starving. The smartasses would retort, “Then wrap it up and send it to them.” I would like to snatch an octuple bypass burger and do exactly that.
Shallow breathing starves us of air; gulps through the mouth come in cold and unfiltered, and our lungs hate us for it. We breathe in many ways—and most of them are wrong.
Absence only makes the heart grow fonder under limited conditions; extend it, and you are looking at a different cliché entirely: out of sight, out of mind.
The famous American playwright left St. Louis, but St. Louis never left him.
For Black Americans, the questions might be asked, what does Christmas mean to us? And how can we make Christmas something usable for us? If, as Frederick Douglass argues, Christmas was tainted by the power politics of slavery, as the stories in Collier-Thomas’s collection make clear, it was equally tainted by Jim Crow and segregation.