Do You Have to Like the Main Character?
When I defended likability, I sounded, even to my own ears, naïve.
Arts & Letters
How Dorm Rooms Chart the Dimensions of Maturity
(Photo by Marcus Loke via Unsplash)
People in their late teens and early twenties are prone to conversational silence around most adults, their parents included. But there is an easy way around this reticence if you want to get to know them better: Just peek into their…
The Presumption of Maps
It was the kind of area where my incomplete understanding, which should mean comedy, became not tragedy, not emptiness or absence, but presence without meaning.
Of American Frogs and Pirates
The handlers of the competing frogs were not seasoned adults with complex strategies for teaching a frog to jump from a dead sit upon a prompt. The frog handlers were children. Their contribution to training their frogs appeared to be getting their frogs to the competition alive.
Lennon-Ono Documentary Also a Snapshot of America
Because this film cannot help suggesting a comparison of ’60s engagement with post-millennial numbness, it becomes a bit of an indictment of us, a spreading-around of Hannah Arendt’s evil.
The Presidential Fitness Test Is Back to Shame Us All over Again? Great!
If any single contradiction defines us as Americans, it is that we are gluttons for the spectacle of team sports, but for the most part we starve ourselves of individual exercise.
Our nation’s high schools abound in football and basketball teams as social and civic…
I Am Not Very Happy Now: And Other Lessons from Small Children About Facing Pain
Diversity, inclusion, and the pursuit of equity may be on the run in the 2020s, but I look around this campus, this city, and this country, and I can see that a lot of different kinds of people are still here. I am still here. We are still here. What now?
First No Reading Lamps, Then No Books?
Will we stop reading altogether? And what will we substitute, to deepen our souls?
Using What You Have
It is not a small problem, finding the right balance of things in a place to live, including that your time outdoors is not just a walk from house to car.
Our American Assassins
The first anniversary of the July 13, 2024, attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump landed with all the grace of a brick hurled through a living room window.
Few of Trump’s critics dared to comment on it then, except to say that political violence in the…