Balzac, who married only late in life, is unclear whether a husband or a wife would need to be an almost-genius to create a good husband. Maybe by genius he meant the attendant spirit of a couple working together to make something, which after all is a chief value in marriage.
The compromises that have tenuously held together the marriage of convenience that is the American body politic are eroding under unprecedented societal forces: shifting demographics, climate change, a global pandemic, mass unemployment, and massive economic inequality. These forces shock a nation like infidelity, job loss, or family pressures might shock a marriage.
Late Marriage is one of the few films concerning marriage bold enough to suggest that our modern insistence on personal fulfillment in romance is the double-edged sword that brings two people together but can also poison them with expectations that tear romance apart. And it is one of the more honest films about marriage in its open, forthright acknowledgment that the institution—and in this film, marriage is most certainly an institution—involves far more than the forces and desires of two people.
Gene Mauch taught me something about the pain and inevitability of losing, the harshness of fate, the indifference of the gods to your pleas. Sometimes losing can have a bigger impact on you than winning.
Wife-carrying leaves me with mixed emotions. It sounds prehistoric, conjuring images of flickering firelight and women slung over one shoulder, screaming. But carrying one’s new wife over a threshold? Something primal, locked deep inside me, still thrills to those images.
Sick to my stomach at the naivete that kept me besotted with horse-drawn carriages and blind to the risks of anachronism, I look up the Animal Welfare Act and see to my relief that it protects horses. Then I realize I am looking at the Animal Welfare Act in the UK.
Tuskegee Institute Nurse Eunice Rivers Laurie. (Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration Southeast Region Records of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention) Eunice Verdell Rivers was born on November 12, 1899, in Jakin, Georgia. She was best known as “Nurse Rivers” during her…
On this Veterans’ Day, Shirley Graham Du Bois might be remembered in her own right as a veteran of some important battles in a long war.
Daniel Berrigan first met Dorothy Day during his Jesuit formation in the early ’50s, bringing his Brooklyn Prep students to her place near the Bowery. “It was life-changing for all of us,” he remembered. In 1961 Day attended a talk of Berrigan’s on Catholic social teaching and the influence of John XXIII. “Just like a priest!” she snapped afterward, leaving no time for others to discuss, but the next day she requested a copy of his talk for possible publication.
It is impossible to draw a direct causal link from November 1989 to all that came in its wake, but by making the unthinkable thinkable, the fall of the Berlin Wall set off a much larger cascade of events.