Somewhere between pages 25 and 30, showcasing my daughter’s fourth-grade photo and Christmas of 2015, the images cease, as if my photo album took a different route from my own at some mysterious fork in time. Somehwere between the physical world and the ether of the digital, years slipped away, as if they never took form.
Through centuries of existence, in a multitude of translations, and in myriad versions and bindings, the Bible has never mustered victory in any battle besides sheer force of influence. Even then, and up against all the glories and benefits its believers promise, it still finds plenty of ways to fall short. Put both of those qualities together, and you get a book everyone should read, even in taxpayer-funded public schools.
What Turner’s remarkable painting of that long-ago night in London reminds us, though, is that if fire’s wrath is not ours to contain, it will always remain dormant and waiting for our homage, whether framed or not.
Rather than skulk in the corners of history some of the most turbulent figures in radical left terrorism found fertile afterlives in popular culture, both film and music, that treat them alternately as doomed romantics or curious, bizarre artifacts.
We seem unable to acknowledge the greatness of the 1990s not because we cannot remember its halcyon spirit but because we refuse to.
‘Small Things Like These’ neither lifts the heart nor breaks it. Instead, it is a quiet story suspended in the hopes of what Christmas might mean in years to come—and could mean now, this very year, if and when we find courage enough to search for it.
Readers old enough to remember the golden age of magazine and newspaper columns can hold their heads in despair, or they can pick up the latest collection of works by Calvin Trillin, a Missouri native (Kansas City, to be exact) and a master of the form.
The future is written faster than we can read it, but that does not mean we cannot try, even if all there is to see or read are backs turned toward us, or eyes looking away. One trick of being a capable parent is not overplaying your hand or pressing your argument. Just do your best to see what your child sees.
Romantic anguish, or desires, are set off within seconds via texts. Consumer fulfillment is stretched like taffy whenever we check tracking services on an order. If you endure the returns process waiting in line at the post office, or Amazon returns location, it becomes a sentence on a desert island. Never will the two points of fulfillment meet.
Tocqueville’s book on the French Revolution is less known in our country than his larger book chronicling American social character. In this era of “America First!” it makes sense that we prefer to read about ourselves. Ancien Régime and the Revolution, though, contains political arguments more important to our time because ours is a time of seismic political change.
Science says that pain, done right, confers marked benefits. The trick, as in so many realms of life, is finding the right spot on the spectrum between what is chronic and what is manageable.
Watching ‘This Sporting Life,’ the viewer marvels at how Machin keeps on “winning” at every turn yet still fails to find the elusive victory he craves.