I recognize the email address; this guy has written to me periodically over the years, either to share outrage over some social injustice, add a little insight, or offer warm concern. Now, for the first time, he is the one in trouble: he says he is about to be evicted […]
I am fussing over the slavering contributions to Trump’s inaugural fund—especially the millions forked over by CEOs who are unlikely, in the privacy of their suites, to even deem him presidential. “Is everything pay-to-play now?” I exclaim. The silence of the newspaper that broke Watergate can now be bought, and the giants of […]
Who needs a time machine? I look out the window and see snow falling, and I am five again. Excited as the snow deepens, thrilled (still) to play in it, cozy in front of a fire afterward. The adult in me loves the way snow covers an often ugly world with pure loveliness—white […]
In A French Village, when her son is killed by a German bomb, a man tells the keening mother to “Be dignified.” I would slap him, but instead she pulls herself together. In a later episode, a young woman is fired from her job as a maid because she is Jewish. She turns […]
The fabric is Scottish broadcloth, a white as warm as the sunlit cathedral stone. The colors have the pure brilliance of the stained glass. The design is clean, strong, and radiant; I cannot imagine anything more joyful. Or riskier. In a time when many Catholics are growing more conservative, the Archbishop of Paris […]
When we moved into our house, a friend took in the black wrought iron fence, the house set well back from its perimeter, and grinned. “The Munsters.” Our haunting, though, took the form of rust. And because somewhere beneath the layers of black Rustoleum was an embossed date in the 1800s, we […]
If you asked me, I would say I am not a perfectionist. I know this because I am so painfully aware of how many times I screw up or fall short, and how much is always left to do…. Oliver Burkeman does not share my denial, but he does share my compulsions—to do […]
Spoilers throughout. Deserved spoilers, maybe even a tad vengeful, because Playground humbled me on so many levels at once. First and most happily, Richard Powers’s descriptions of the strange, almost unfathomable beauty beneath the sea are the most lyrical and engaging I have ever read. As a boy, he wanted to be an […]
Sneak a peek at the palette of an artist. It will be far more interesting, and revealing, than peering inside their medicine cabinet at a party. In The Artist’s Palette, Alexandra Loske, a British-German art historian, demonstrates the game, describing fifty idiosyncratic selections and arrangements of colors, then showing us the art that […]
Weeks ago, the sweet family across the street put up their festive holiday lights. The house on the corner followed, then three more houses, all before I had even managed to order a Thanksgiving turkey. I curse the lights. Typically American, I mutter, meaning of course U.S. American, where we are so arrogant […]
