What Cannot Be Spoken
Novels, news, plays, debates, speeches, texts, films, podcasts, instructions—we move through life on a conveyor belt of words. Yet the most powerful are those that cannot be uttered.
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The Museum of Everything There Is
Photo of an exhibit in the museum, by John Griswold Ms. Charlotte Davis wanted to show me everything. I was standing on the porch of the log cabin next to the museum, and when I turned she had appeared on the steps, an older local lady with tight…
The Eyes that Watched Bette Davis’s Eyes
The first Davis movie I ever saw was "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" in about 1963 or 1964 when it was first telecast. I must have been eleven or twelve, and the film scared the heck out of me.
Sweden’s Mysterious Sleeping Sickness: Psychosomatic or Coerced?
In the past two decades, more than one thousand children have taken anxiety and dread deep into their bodies, falling into what has been named uppgivenhetssyndrom, a giving-up we translate as “resignation syndrome.” They withdraw into a catatonic state, showing no response to stimulus, sustained for months or even years by a feeding tube and diapers.
What Side-Eye Toddler Tells Us About Ourselves
The explosion of interest in NFTs seems a harmless quirk of the market, like the absurd price a retro action figure, boxed and pristine, can command on eBay. But why would the mere fact of $74,000 wipe away skepticism and convince us, purely by the abstract value attached to the abstract cryptocurrency used to buy intangible pixels, that such barter holds promise for our future?
The Houston Women’s March
A crowd of thousands at City Hall in Houston. Photo by John Griswold A would-be participant in the Houston Women’s March for reproductive and voting rights stood in a line of three dozen people waiting to pay to park on Saturday morning, in a lot next to Minute…
Holy Cow!
Cows see more than we realize. Hariana cows, writes Lampert, insist on authenticity and will “go quite crazy” if someone lies in their presence. Mainly, though, they contain their criticism. “Cows are among the gentlest of breathing creatures,” Thomas de Quincey wrote.
The Manor to Which I Could Get Accustomed
Anton Chekhov’s home and garden south of Moscow. Photo by John Griswold I live with a blessed patch of pines between me and the main road, so I do not think about traffic much until the screaming sirens fly past, quite close, and I have to wait to see…
Yesterdays and the Long Goodbye
My sister’s death reminds me that life is about loss, learning to accept losing without rancor, without pity. I think that is what the blues are about, a persecuted people creating an art form about losing, the austere sublimity of losing, first slowly, then faster.
From Amorous Novelist to Buddhist Nun
In 1998, Jakuchō Setouchi recast the refined court language of "The Tale of Genji," said to be the world’s first novel, in contemporary, highly accessible Japanese prose. Her edition—which emphasizes the heroines, not just the prince—sold more than 2.1 million copies and set off an explosion of interest in the classic. Eight years later, a grateful emperor placed the Order of Culture medal around her neck.