By Ben Fulton

How Budget Hotels Deliver Us into Liminal States

By Ben Fulton

There is no use pretending you are someone special when, in fact, you are just another person passing through. So look hard at that tacky framed print on the wall. Heft your Gideon Bible. Scrape your bare feet over the wiry carpet. Turn on the TV screen lodged just two feet from the edge of your bed. Tune out, and join the thousands of invisible hands of everyone else before you who also felt alien, alone, or maybe even a little bit alive in that very same room.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Duluth, Minnesota, and the Liberation of Lo-fi Travel

By Ben Fulton

When contemplating travel, we cannot help but think big: London, Paris, or—why not?—even flights to Australia and New Zealand lasting more than a whole day’s time. It is those magical interstices just within reach we tend to forget, the local gems just across the way that, once taken in, might blow our minds in ways so subtle we do not at first recognize them.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

When Words Become Sounds

By Ben Fulton

Words need the company of other words, preferably lots of them, else they fall into a strange pit of meaningless, yet mind-altering sound. Like us, words are social when mingling in tantalizing combinations, and perilously, curiously lonely, but still attractive, by themselves.

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Beethoven’s Immoral, Tasteless Usurpers, and Then Some

By Ben Fulton

What hurts so much about these depressing examples is that they reveal one of the world’s greatest composers to be little more than window dressing to our naïve hopes about enlightened hearts and human progress. How could an artist of such immortal genius be so powerless, almost helpless, when confronted by the darkness of the human heart? And if art as elevated as Beethoven cannot help save us from ourselves, who can?

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

When Worlds Collide, or Not

By Ben Fulton

Space exploration and colonization will continue to seduce multi-billionaires eager to display their technical competence and power, but that does not mean they deserve such outsize attention. We as a species are much better off, the Weinersmiths point out in their book A City on Mars, using a “wait-and-go-big” approach of solving more problems on Earth prior to introducing our fraught selves to additional solar systems. Space settlement is not a goal to pursue, but a milestone that must be earned.

Reviews

Bleak House v. Trump

By Ben Fulton

As our national landscape becomes consumed and reshaped by hundreds of lawsuits, appeals, and judgements, Dickens’s ’Bleak House‘ reminds us of the grotesqueries that will be born as a result, but also of the life that survives and waits for us all outside the courtroom. 

Arts & Letters | Dispatches

Into the Tallow End

By Ben Fulton

“Tallow.” Say it carefully even once or twice and we notice instantly its phonetic advantage over the word “lard,” which sounds suspiciously like “lord” but falls just one vowel short of such esteem because no one would like to think of using God’s name in vain, much less as something we might cook with.

People & Places | Dispatches

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