For a moment, I caught myself thinking: this dancefloor is the happiest place on earth. Not in the saccharine way Disney markets happiness, but in the way fugitive joy exists—imperfect, defiant, and fleeting. The kind of happiness that knows how precarious it is and yet insists on itself anyway.
James Gunn’s Superman gives his film’s Man of Tomorrow three notable speeches—one about kindness, one about respect, and one about honor—that, in any normal year, would make every eyeball in the theatre roll back into its socket.
I was used to my makeup and costume, but the one-inch heels, painful toes, and tight uppers of my tanker boots made me walk suspiciously, like a poor guy with a belly full of free eggs and a heart filled with larceny. My overall straps hung down in back like I had forgotten to fasten them after a trip to the outhouse. Yet the staff treated me and everyone else with cheerful professionalism. They knew how to handle an army of amateurs and loose cannons and get the job done.
When I defended likability, I sounded, even to my own ears, naïve.
(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…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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?