Maybe the crueler sorts of shame are having a resurgence not just because we have the technology but because we feel out of control. Maybe we are desperately hoping there is still a common moral standard to which others can be held. Or maybe we still believe, deep in our gut, that shame works, no matter how much pain it causes.
Heaving a heavy sigh makes an eloquent statement. A full and heartfelt sigh is done with the mouth open, but that quick, gusty sigh through the nostrils? That is contempt.
Courtesy Self-Storage, Wikimedia Commons In storage lockers we offshore the domestic. We place there the things that will not fit in our homes, until they can be brought in from the cold. It is not direct metaphor, but something more like signal or sign, that the often unheated…
The author of "The Dice Man”—that dangerous book that influenced billionaire Richard Branson and had a British gonzo journalist nearly trash his career and disappear—was not a jaded psychoanalyst named Luke Rhinehart. He was a mild, sweet English professor named George Cockcroft. Though he was married (faithfully, we presume) to the same woman for sixty-three years, he had a vivid imagination.
More than common sense suggests that Missouri’s scrupulously limited information might be counterproductive. A raft of studies show that “increasing emphasis on abstinence education is positively correlated with teenage pregnancy and birth dates.” Positively correlated.
Courtesy Fantagraphics Books Steve Brodner’s Living & Dying in America: A Daily Chronicle, 2020-2022, is a fascinating and unusual graphic memoir. In the book’s 476 pages, Brodner has captured the feel of the first two Covid years by drawing one image every evening from that day. These range…
The concept of sumptuary laws is so alien, I am intrigued. Though they pretended to be highminded and austere, a free pass could nearly always be bought.
The next time I wonder what I am feeling, maybe I should take my actual pulse. What is my body feeling? How should I interpret that? Will a label help, and if so, what label will help the most? Because I suspect I jump too quickly to the same old conclusions.
Orange is a wonderful color, useful for denoting everything from royalty to religion, from the incarcerated to the insightful.
This a tricky time to start a theatre company. But halfway into Albion Theatre company's run of "Heroes," the play is a resounding success. It ignores short attention spans, opening with the three vets sitting silent on the patio, staring at the weather.