I have been reading with interest the new book Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty (Oxford UP), by Mark Robert Rank, Lawrence M. Eppard, and Heather E. Bullock. (Rank is a professor in the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis.)…
Instead of watching with vigilance for a stacked-stone wall or an S-curve or a white church steeple, I respond to robotic voice commands. It is a state of mind that turns me inward, disconnecting me from the land even as I move across it.
About seventy-five percent of all compliments are about appearance, with only five or six percent falling into categories of performance, ability, taste, or possessions. Why are we so shallow and unimaginative?
Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian InstitutionCC0 When my first collection of essays was coming out a few years ago, a friend asked me to write down what I had learned about the process of assembling and editing the book, which was different from writing a novel or…
Shakespeare wanted us to struggle with an inscrutable villain. With evil itself. Our age equates evil with psychopathy, pointing to a physiological absence of the brain structures and biochemicals that give us empathy.
“Check in on your single friends,” freshly elected Vice President Kamala Harris urged last Thanksgiving. Five simple words, but behind them a sea change in how we organize our common lives.
Nothing is as simple, as pure, or as absolute as we want it to be. And there is intrigue and rich meaning in all these layers we cover over.
There is strength in bitchiness. Which takes me to the root of my aversion: Why, in women, was (and is) strength equated with meanness?
We need to give each other rooms. Giving “space” can be necessary, but space also needs to be enclosed; to protect what lies within its walls.
These whips are called “disciplines” or “scourges.” Some are made of leather; his seems gentler, a coarse fine rope. It is the pale tan of wheat, which makes the bloodstain more prominent.