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?
Will we stop reading altogether? And what will we substitute, to deepen our souls?
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.
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…
There is no use pretending you are someone special when, in fact, you are just another person passing through. So look hard at that tacky framed print on the wall. Heft your Gideon Bible. Scrape your bare feet over the wiry carpet. Turn on the TV screen lodged just two feet from the edge of your bed. Tune out, and join the thousands of invisible hands of everyone else before you who also felt alien, alone, or maybe even a little bit alive in that very same room.
It was an astonishing moment for me, who never felt settled in what he knew.
When contemplating travel, we cannot help but think big: London, Paris, or—why not?—even flights to Australia and New Zealand lasting more than a whole day’s time. It is those magical interstices just within reach we tend to forget, the local gems just across the way that, once taken in, might blow our minds in ways so subtle we do not at first recognize them.
History grows us up. And literature? It complicates the world for us. This is why we must kill the humanities.
Everything about Mark Twain, Ron Chernow shows us, is writ large, heartbreak and loss a constant redundancy, his explosive fits of anger and condemnation, his repeated lapses into sentimentality, a reiteration of public complaints somehow enabled rather than contradicted by his wondrous humor, a wit at once profound and outrageous. But Twain’s is merely an exaggeration of our existence, its pain and its joy, our past, and our culture, inescapably our Americanness.
Was Randle Patrick McMurphy a fool to go up against Nurse Ratched? Was Nelson Mandela a fool to spend twenty-seven years in prison? Was Alexei Navalny a fool to taunt the Russian powers girding Vladimir Putin and suffer poisoning, prison, and death?