The Poet and the Priest
Is it an American thing that we fawn over glitzy celebrities but pay scholars less overt attention? In France, intellectuals are invited guests on talk shows. In Ireland, literature is sacred.
Uncategorized
The Return of the Muumuu
In the painful days, women dressed for men. Then we realized men did not much care, and we began dressing for the people who gave us compliments—other women. Now, at long last, we are doing what every three-year-old demands to do: dressing for ourselves.
What the Boogaloo Bois Are Not
We held our own against the Soviet Union as a Cold War superpower, only to have an impoverished Russia influence our president and our elections. What if we make it through our latest civil rights revolution, only to have some dudes in aloha shirts blow us up?
The Winter of Our Discontent
“If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere,” the Irish poet Seamus Heaney once wrote. The phrase is now relevant in a way he never anticipated. That is not surprising; poetry pushes past a poet’s limits to trespass on the universal. And thanks to COVID-19, the whole world…
Here Are Some of My Pans
There is something almost magical about a display of humble, well-used tools, as a physical manifestation of a life and calling. It is evidence of the culling of what does not work, and the re-use of and care for what does. It reminds that the tool is not the knowledge, but that which permits knowledge to act; it shows a piety to craft, and a mastery like saintliness of an art.
When Scholarly Articles Are Fraud, Whim, or Total Insanity
“Elsevier says it is investigating how one of its journals managed to publish a paper with patently absurd assertions about the genetic inheritance of personality traits,” I read in the newsletter of Retraction Watch, a brilliant ten-year-old project undertaken by two scientists. Regularly appalled by what passes for research, they…
Princess Bride Gets Put to Use
The latest reading of "The Princess Bride," in support of Democratic victory in swing-state Wisconsin, was fun to watch but had its share of lags, unsynched voices, dead mics, pixellated video, and the tops of heads of people reading from texts. That is to say, it perfectly mimicked the Zoom meetings of our time.
Why Women Can Dress Like Men But Not Vice Versa
A woman slips on her boyfriend’s cotton shirt, its shoulders dropping inches below hers, and rolls up the long, long sleeves. She looks even more feminine. A man borrows his girlfriend’s soft blue pashmina, swinging one end over his broad shoulder. He looks far less masculine. I am using traditional…
The Clothes We All Abandoned
Any day now, I will slip on something I loved and find it no longer fits or even suits me, after this feral reprieve and all the stress cookies. Yet I miss what those clothes used to mean, the idea of them, the feel. The missing is not vanity; I am hardly a clotheshorse.
Unserious Clamor
Screenshot of YouTube video by News2Share in August. The title essay of Tatyana Tolstaya’s Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Russia and Russians is an account of the changes in feeling toward Russian writers, within Russia, over time. The essay questions the writer’s role, as artist and as citizen, and…