Richard Powers Makes Your Brain His Playground
Spoilers can be justified: without them you will need to go back and read this whole gorgeous book all over again.
By Jeannette Cooperman
How Artists’ Palettes Have Changed–and How We Have
Colors drawn from nature are now synthetic and often garish...much like our daily life.
In Sickness and in Health
A marriage must be flexible. One is strong while the other flags, then you meet in the middle and run parallel for a while, then the music stops and you switch, fast as a game of musical chairs.
Christmas Creep Has Left Us Confused
Like children, we rush the season, celebrating each holiday long before it arrives and growing sick of all of them. Sure, greedy retailers—but does the problem go deeper?
We Drink So We Can Trust Each Other
The three-martini lunch, once standard, turned scandalous in the seventies, hastily replaced by light beer and wine coolers. Then came a defiant resurgence of glam cocktails and cigar bars, followed by a wave of sober-curious shaming....
Architecture Can Heal Us
Our everyday environment “used to be quaint and quirky,” Vishaan Chakrabarti writes. “Now it is mundane and monolithic.”
The National Archives Deletes Our Problematic Past
Slavery, the Holocaust, Japanese internment camps, the birth control pill--all much too messy and confrontational to remember.
Saying Grace
It is heartening (and this is a measure of where we have been) to remember that civility is not dead, not abandoned, not impossible, not a waste of breath.
Pronouns Are Ruining Our Lives
We need to abolish pronouns altogether. And not for the reason you think.
Election Day in a Small Town in Southern Illinois
“Both the media and the politicians benefit from keeping us divided. They push us to the extremes, because that is where the clicks and the money are.”
Conclave Breaks the Seal of Secrecy
This extraordinary film reveals the Vatican’s secretive and shadowy aspect, easily seen as sinister but felt by insiders as plain necessity.
Gossip from the Hôtel Biron, Where Paris’s Later-Famed Artists Were Housemates
Rodin, Camille Claudel, a free-spirited dancer named Isadora Duncan, nineteen-year-old Jean Cocteau, the painter Henri Matisse, and Rainer Maria Rilke--all housemates at a shabby hotel in Paris. Imagine the drama.