Sacred Monotony
This thing that I had avoided for years, that our entire culture avoids, turned out to be, overused but accurate word, transformative.
Arts & Letters
Small Things Like These is Christmas Forever Imagined
‘Small Things Like These’ neither lifts the heart nor breaks it. Instead, it is a quiet story suspended in the hopes of what Christmas might mean in years to come—and could mean now, this very year, if and when we find courage enough to search for it.
Of Vacation
If fate gave me a job so well-fitted that when I take time off I do most of what I would do anyway, why bother with vacation?
Richard Powers Makes Your Brain His Playground
Spoilers can be justified: without them you will need to go back and read this whole gorgeous book all over again.
How Artists’ Palettes Have Changed–and How We Have
Colors drawn from nature are now synthetic and often garish...much like our daily life.
Requiem for a Punster: Leonard Slatkin Pays Tribute to P.D.Q. Bach (and Peter Schickele)
On Monday, November 25, Leonard Slatkin and the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis will present D.BachL, presumably pronounced “debacle,” a tribute to the composer Peter Schickele.
How Our Mail-Order Age Warps Time and Desire
Romantic anguish, or desires, are set off within seconds via texts. Consumer fulfillment is stretched like taffy whenever we check tracking services on an order. If you endure the returns process waiting in line at the post office, or Amazon returns location, it becomes a sentence on a desert island. Never will the two points of fulfillment meet.
Architecture Can Heal Us
Our everyday environment “used to be quaint and quirky,” Vishaan Chakrabarti writes. “Now it is mundane and monolithic.”
The 2024 Election Through the Eyes of a Nineteenth-Century Historian
Tocqueville’s book on the French Revolution is less known in our country than his larger book chronicling American social character. In this era of “America First!” it makes sense that we prefer to read about ourselves. Ancien Régime and the Revolution, though, contains political arguments more important to our time because ours is a time of seismic political change.
Mind the Gap: Tracking the Distance Between Forest Park Today and Filipino “Human Zoos” of the 1904 World’s Fair
Immigrants seeking refuge in the country responsible for their humanitarian crisis is not new. Particularly for America. What was new, however, was the largest human zoo in the world modeled in our own backyard, two years after the Philippine-American war ended.