If you were practicing the denial we all need just to get out of bed every morning, enjoying the spring sunshine until you heard those words, consider that you are not recovering from a nervous breakdown, as Eliot was, and Europe has not just been devastated by World War I. Some pain cannot be denied.
First Book, a nonprofit in D.C., is storing and shipping books so that at each visit, every child receives a fresh, shiny new hardbound book instead of the worn, stained paperbacks they are usually given. Build-A-Bear has joined the partnership to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, and is giving 125,000 additional books—and 125,000 “reading buddy” teddy bears—to Title I schools across the country.
The best part of the documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain and the select best of Bourdain’s many shows embodies the complexity of trying to hold all the beauty and pain as he moved down the road.
When breeders are only concerned with appearance, they may be allowing beautiful animals to pass on traits that predispose them for aggression: reactivity and fearfulness.
Handing over your data is as obligatory as a patdown by law enforcement; we resist at our own risk.
Does joy flow from temperament, then, or from grace? What does it matter? Joy defies gravity. Poised at the edge of a cliff, you need it more than ever.
Photo by John Griswold https://commonreader.washu.edu/app/uploads/2023/03/Recipe-Stories-Happiness-Tacos.mp3 It can be hard to match the quality of tacos with that of your happiness sometimes. I thought the tacos and margaritas festival would do it: Not just food and drink, but a taco-eating contest, hot pepper-eating contest, live music,…
If this is our notion of inclusivity, we are doomed.
There are indeed joke-telling and joke-writing techniques, but the comic sensibility cannot be taught. Finding something funny in the first place—seeing the absurdity, the irony, the analogy, the edge—is what matters, and it emerges from a combination of detachment, affinity, and wry intelligence.
Here I am then, standing at a podium while an organizer makes an introduction so overly generous that out-of-town attendees wonder what is happening.