Do I Hate the Modern or Just What It Fails to Represent?
Finally, I confess...and realize what I have been missing.
Arts & Letters
How Roy Ayers Put Soul on “Nice”
Roy Ayers coasted on his unique sentiment and vibe. It was sublime, positive, and unfailingly warm and luminescent. What else would you expect a writer, any writer, to say about the musical talent who gave us the song “Everybody Loves The Sunshine”?
How Zelensky Might Channel Thucydides
It is anyone’s guess as to whether Ukrainian President Volodoymyr Zelensky has read ‘The History of the the Peloponnesian War,’ even if his words spill into realms that Thucydides, with his imperatives for the preservation of law and solidarity against violence and calamity, would recognize at once.
Most Points Wins
The goal is to make you feel slightly more virtuous, briefly. But why stop there? People are crazy, and times are strange.
I Hate Nazis. Why Does Facebook Want Me to See Them So Badly?
Facebook’s algorithms, which drive what any of us see individually, are a mystery to most of us. At best they make us passive consumers; at worst, easy pupils to brain-train for nefarious ends.
The Universal, Demarcating Power of The Scream
By drawing a line between its disturbed central figure and the serenity of the two bystanders at the vanishing point of the painting’s perspective, The Scream asks us to question the “sanity” we pretend to hold on to.
Music Not Missiles: Memories of a Reluctant Cold Warrior
The guys in Gaza must be nearing 60 like my bandmates and I. I wonder if they stayed in our country after they were free to return to theirs without booking a steady gig in a gulag. I wonder what they make of Vladimir Putin having an ally in the White House or a short-timer like Pete Hegseth having oversight of the mightiest military on Earth.
Oksana Maksymchuk and the War in Ukraine
Oksana Maksymchuk explained that she started writing ‘Still City’ in Ukraine, “maybe half a year before the actual invasion in the summer of 2021…and the Russian troops were amassing on the border, and we were assured that there would be nothing happening, but it seemed very threatening. I thought, ‘I’m going to write it as a kind of narrative about a non-event,’ something that I was sure would not take place.”
Letters from Howard Nemerov’s Discreet Love Affair Are Finally Unfolded
The world knew Nemerov's poetry. No one guessed his heart.
Zombie Comics
Zombie strips, they are called, drawn long after the original artist has died, and going through the motions for syndication. Bill Watterson, adored for his art and admired for his integrity against corporate newspapers and marketing, criticized this phenomenon. It is said Charles Schultz left instructions not to allow it to happen to his strip.