Given several decades, money, and a certain angle on history perhaps planned cities can and do work on some level, and for certain people. The problem with politicians’ well-laid plans is that they rarely work for anyone but the well-off.
Whatever you might think about advertising as an engine of the market economy, it is often juxtaposed with death in the media, nowhere more than online, and it is a symptom. It is a relief to lie in my bed at night and read the print issue, which I got as if by the publisher’s afterthought in a discount deal for my online subscription.
Fasting has been accorded such power, and it has taken so many forms, there must be something to it. Denying oneself can be salutary. It is fun, now and again, to stay up all night.
I heard my most memorable account of Joseph Stalin while sitting in the pews of a Presbyterian church. I was near late adolescence, young enough to be bored by a church service but old enough to take intermittent interest.
Rebellious eccentrics, these artists were brave in their art and, once they had to be, brave in reality. Had they been able to stay, safe and adored, in Paris, they would have remained remote to us, wrapped in mystique. In exile, they were vulnerable.
All religions should make room for the grown-ups to move toward a more open, meditative, inclusive, deconstructed experience. Maybe we could even hold on to what is best about religion if each denomination stopped insisting it possessed the only truth.
Being a socialist in the United States requires walking a narrow path between admission of defeat and ideological hope.
Chris Bruneau, who is no naïf, understands his odds with different eventualities. He also knows that as a junior congressperson, he would be expected to toe the party line, but he is trying to present himself, at least in conversation, as something closer to what used to be a centrist.
I entered the town of Gettysburg from the west, through battlefields marked with picket fences, cannon, and statues. The town was crawling with tourists.
Since it is not far from there, mere seconds in flight time, to the crash site, one is made conscious of how low the aircraft was at that point, of how little time was left, and of the terror of the people onboard.