If any single contradiction defines us as Americans, it is that we are gluttons for the spectacle of team sports, but for the most part we starve ourselves of individual exercise. Our nation’s high schools abound in football and basketball teams as social and civic…
‘The Knick’ is both an homage to physicians and medical researchers of the past, even those wildly wrong but well-meaning. Above all, it is a portent of what we stand to lose when we cannot, or refuse to, remember all that our modern medical establishment was built on a foundation of trial, error, and incredible suffering and loss of life.‘‘
The first anniversary of the July 13, 2024, attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump landed with all the grace of a brick hurled through a living room window. Few of Trump’s critics dared to comment on it then, except to say that political violence in the…
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.
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.
Was Randle Patrick McMurphy a fool to go up against Nurse Ratched? Was Nelson Mandela a fool to spend twenty-seven years in prison? Was Alexei Navalny a fool to taunt the Russian powers girding Vladimir Putin and suffer poisoning, prison, and death?
We had no idea how much we would miss them in the wake of St. Louis’s May 16 tornado. At least, I did not.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Spring, after all, is the supposed season of renewal after the darkness of winter. In fact, for millions of people who straddle the cause-and-effect of depression, allergies, and autoimmune disorders, it is the season of spiritual and physical struggle.