On Losing One’s Letters and One’s Mind
These are tiny disturbances of the domestic sphere, brief incursions of chaos. They remind me of the finite limits of our budget, my patience, and my life span.
Arts & Letters
What Do Women Want? Ask Colleen Hoover
The success of Hoover’s books reminds me how prissy and bourgeois I am. Hoover’s fans say her work leaves them speechless, in tears, happy wrecks.
Evil Finds Horror in the Everyday—Then Laughs at It
The show’s first stroke of genius is the team’s camaraderie. In a time when we dare not even hint at our beliefs to a stranger, “Evil” gives us three people with entirely different world views who—here is the miracle—respect one another’s points of view.
Why Dawn of the Dead is the Seventies’ Ultimate Coming-of-Age Movie
“Dawn of the Dead” turns life and death upside down. Life is a stress-soaked struggle to survive, while death is a lurching, subconscious walk through old, submerged impulses until you die again—by firearm, machete, or blunt force. And why do people refuse to die? Because they want to go shopping.
How a Millais Painting Wages Elegant Battle against Climate Change
A painting cannot give us back days of fall lost. But if we gaze at a painting capable of imparting its own unique sensations, we can at least travel to a different place of mind, a consciousness that might move us forward or even shake us to action.
Miles Davis Showed Us How Taking Risks Was Cool
It takes self-assurance to throw yourself or your plans away in the belief there is no wrong path, only other opportunities to exercise mastery. It is not a game without risk.
Why the Clothes of My Past Stay Closeted
The idea of resurrecting clothes of my youth half a century later, redeeming the hot sting of embarrassment with carefully chosen accessories, intrigued me. Until I remembered what I would be resurrecting.
The Fragile Pleasures of a Road Trip
For better and worse, travel has an emotional component. We see better when we do it, until fatigue and familiarity roll in like fog.
How Did an Estonian Violinist End up in St. Louis’s Concordia Cemetery?
Her early life was a blur, with all those moves—fleeing to safety, getting bombed, getting evacuated, being forced to Berlin, touring, Paris, New York. Her music was the home she carried with her.
Mozart Would Wince at Our Loud Pianos
Today’s pianist, Daniel Adam Maltz, is performing not on a big glossy piano but on the instrument Mozart wrote for: the elegant little Viennese fortepiano.