Searching for a Loose Confidence
I do not want to live like this anymore, scripted and tight and rigid.
By Jeannette Cooperman
Dead Malls and Dreams
Malls sold us canned fantasy. It could have been so different.
House of Secrets
To new generations, the secrecy of the past is often baffling. A secret is a woman laced so tightly into her velvet gown that she cannot breathe or speak. We show up in jeans. Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison”: they isolate the keeper of the secret, require lies, breed distrust, and become the unwanted inheritance of a generation bewildered by the need to keep them.
Do I Hate the Modern or Just What It Fails to Represent?
Finally, I confess...and realize what I have been missing.
Anger Shows Us What We Protect
“What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability."
Symptoms of Windy Hypochondriacal Melancholy
"You listen constantly, in a kind of trance, for communications from your body; it is as if you have become a medium, and your organs a company of fretful ghosts."
What Elon Musk’s Baby Name Should Have Told Us
Names are significant for Elon Musk. And now, for all of us.
Scatological Politics
The gut is a place of confusion. And yet, it remains our best guide....
We Doth Protest—Not Enough
Hey, was that a police car honking in support? Mmm. Probably not.
Prejudice Is Natural
But why is race the dividing line?
Accelerationists? Goethe Warned Us
Past a certain speed, you only create chaos.
Who’s Afraid of Tom Wolfe?
No editor would let a resurrected Tom Wolfe write the way he once did. But it was that breathless spew, uncensored though artful, that let him reach us. Now we only get that much animation from rogue or ranting podcasters and columnists, and it comes soaked in instantly recognizable political bias.