The dog will be good for days on end, staying within the invisible boundaries of our fenceless yard and reappearing in a reasonable time at the side porch door. Then something snaps inside him, and a minute after I let him out, a black streak fast as a panther cuts a diagonal to […]
Remember all those earnest dismantling-racism workshops? They went about it all wrong. They should have set race and guilt and privilege aside and asked participants to think of alternative uses for a brick. That is not entirely facetious. In The Ideological Brain, neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod cites research based on the Alternative Uses Test, […]
In the glorious fifties, that yearned-for destination of MAGA time travelers, my mother’s gynecologist prescribed Valium for her nerves. As a kid, I watched her slowly, shakily, pry herself free of them. It took years. In her seventies, the anxiety came back full force, so she nibbled tiny pieces of the lowest dose […]
The dog runs around my car as I pull into the drive, so I slam on the brakes and skid across the gravel. My husband jogs up, lead in hand. They were about to go for what we wryly call a Daddywalk, meaning a brisk, military-style, one-two-one-two (or would it be two-four?) exercise […]
One of this year’s William G. Ferguson lectures at WashU had a doozy of a title: “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.” I had wondered. Both the loathing and the love felt too extreme to be organic. But I had never dug as […]
T.S. Eliot is literary modernism’s most famous poet. So we can all be forgiven for thinking him merely ironic when he opened his most famous poem by intoning that, “April is the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire… ” By the time Eliot gets past winter, […]
Say you are learning English, and you are trying to figure out what “gut” means. Ah, a beer belly. But who would equate a beer belly with courage? Then your doctor talks about your gut, which is hardly distended, or brave; he seems to refer to coiled innards. Yet a bratty bully yells […]
The occasional validation of clichés and other well-worn phrases by scientific studies is one of life’s unsung oddities if not glories. No one conveys an idea without words to hold them. In the curious case of pain, however, words do some impressive heavy lifting. Clichés about pain are—and, sorry, this cannot be […]
The photo on Facebook shows an older gentleman asleep with a cat on his chest, both smiling in their slumber. The caption explains that the man is the poster’s father, and that this is the father’s “last picture and just that evening, he was no more and took away a part of […]
The first little piggy to leave for market is the big toe. It is the first toe stubbed, the first stepped on by your first, inevitably clumsy dance partner. And it was the first feature that distinguished us from the rest of the hairy apes. Yet poets rhapsodize about elegant hands, […]