Sigh No More
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.
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Found Objects: That Stuff in Storage
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…
Living by the Die
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.
Back When Sex Ed Was Honest
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.
A Daily Visual Diary of the Early Covid Years
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…
Silk and Gold and Caviar All Round
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.
Do Our Words Shape Our Feelings?
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.
Some Interesting Things I Found on the Internet, October Edition
Orange is a wonderful color, useful for denoting everything from royalty to religion, from the incarcerated to the insightful.
A Heroic Escape Plot
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.
Without Fear or Favor
We do need our muck raked. But who, in the current corporate oligarchy, will want to pay for that? And in a media landscape clogged with charging knights—their steeds kicking up clouds of dust in every direction—how are we to locate moral clarity?