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.
By Jeannette Cooperman
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.
What if C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien Had Never Met?
What a wild coincidence, that Lewis and Tolkien were buddies at Oxford. Except, an acclaimed new graphic novel suggests, it was not coincidence at all
Is It Time to Drop the Penny?
That tiny copper disc has become irrelevant, an annoyance, yet one with a rich history. Does it still have a point to make?
A Jesuit’s Reluctant, Beautiful Confession
Roberto Bolaño is having a moment. Where better to start than "A Night in Chile," a slim, hypnotic, relentlessly compelling masterpiece.
The Guilty Pleasures of Emily in Paris
I tried to avoid this show. Then I succumbed.
There Is No Place like Home, Whatever That Is
As soon as you can reach high, grab the shiny doorknob, and toddle outside, you see what your homeworld actually looks like. Odds are, it will be the first thing you draw: a box with a triangle on top, two square eyes to let the sunshine in, a tall door to let your friends in. It is your kangaroo pouch, familiar and comforting when the rest of the world is strange.
Time to Rethink the Mississippi Watershed—and Design Itself
“Water is one of the most politicized things on Earth, if not the most,” Hoeferlin notes. “Yet it is apolitical. Water goes where it wants to go. It will find its way.”
Winnie the Pooh Would Have Loved This
If the bees' queen begins to falter, they induce her replacement, as political parties have been known to do. If she dies, the entire colony realizes it can no longer smell her scent, and a “queenless roar” goes up, an agitation that triggers the raising of the next queen.