With Relentless Mischief, Life Surprises Us
No matter how tight your friendships, you cannot predict where you will find a burst of empathy and help.
No matter how tight your friendships, you cannot predict where you will find a burst of empathy and help.
The big toe freed our hands to make art, use tools, carry babies, and write literature. Why do we mock it?
Robinson Jeffers thought even our angst was self-centered. “We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;/ We must unhumanize our views a little.”
Do not underestimate the humble No. 2 pencil.
Go look for soulmates in Paris, as Martha Gellhorn did. Loosen lifelong inhibitions in Tahiti. Retire in Mexico.
Before doubt, angst, and a few medical issues canceled our plans to have kids, I always thought I would want a boy. Kindroid can give me one!
Nobody mentioned that we would be eating more because we were still craving the kind of taste we barely remembered, and we were still in need of the vitamins and minerals that had been leached from these big juicy hollow tomatoes and this gluteny, mineral-stripped wheat.
I had to know how all this began. A beauty influencer named Jools Lebron (joolieannie on TikTok) posted it, I read first. She was at least funny. “See how I do my makeup for work? Very demure, very mindful…. A lot of you girls go to the interview looking like Marge Simpson and go to the job looking like Patty and Selma. Not demure.”
Admirers of Reinhold Niebuhr have included Martin Luther King Jr., Hubert Humphrey, Jimmy Carter, John McCain, James Comey. “He’s one of my favorite philosophers,” Barack Obama told David Brooks, also a Niebuhr fan.
Steve Vender is a tough, daring private investigator. It feels strangely right that the book most important to him is Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.