Done right, bonsai offer a serene beauty—to the beholder. Inside the plant, a genetic code is crashing, and a vital impulse—to grow!—still bubbles. It will die only when the plant dies. Until then, this life force must be constantly constrained. The gardener’s fight may be quiet, dignified, and artistic, but it is relentless.
When Christian art depicts demons, they are being cast out or redeemed. The images at Sauherad are purely demonic, an intertwined decadence with no white space. A detail shot looks like an eerie Seek and Find game, filled with demons, clerics, and bishops; goats, lambs, owls, and insect claws; princesses, tormented men, and masked figures. Nobody was there to counter them, banish them, or save them; they writhed on the wall unchecked.
We have been persuaded that ugly is more efficient. And why? Because it is cheaper. In this raw and hungry young country, we allowed our technology to outstrip aesthetics. Integrating the two would cost more, require tedious effort, take valuable time—and why would capitalists bother?
The wreck of the ‘USS Inaugural,’ October 21, 2021 Every few years the Mississippi at St. Louis drops enough to reveal the wreck of a WWII minesweeper, the USS Inaugural, lying in a few feet of water, next to the Missouri shore. How it came to be there…
The Korean War (1950-1953) is largely forgotten in the United States, although the United States lost about 35,000 men in that war. Many American students do not know we fought there as that war is overshadowed by World War II and the Vietnam War.
Our forbears mistrusted slime. Back in the ninth century, a Chinese scholar named one specimen “demon droppings.” European folklore presents slime mold as witches’ work. Today, we seem to be redeeming the stuff.
The soap opera element made “No Time to Die,” at times, deadening to watch, as if it had come to a complete halt and the audience is asked to take a bunch of unserious characters seriously as if they are anchored in a reality where actual people live. This is simply pretentiousness.
Places we thought weak, isolated, cut off, backwater, and undeveloped have developed something very different: an understanding of interdependence. And that could reshape how we understand the world, how we live in the world, and how we make policy.
Now that I have shed the self-consciousness of childhood’s fierce inner life and realized I am not the only one who cherishes books and I do not have to protect them single-handedly against bubblegum and mocking boys . . . my heart has softened toward the bookmobile.
Photo by John Griswold Of course a city garbage truck—big, dangerous, smelly—was the big hit at the local Touch a Truck event today, and both kids and parents enthused over it. My younger son had volunteered to help staff the event, and it was one of our first…