Tales from a Train
Riding coach on Amtrak today is more like taking a nice bus. No doubt I will arrive weary, disillusioned and, as the Victorians put it, “travel-stained.”
By Jeannette Cooperman
The Elephant on the Patio
I have watered this plant copiously, backed off watering, fed her miracles, scooted her huge pot inch by inch toward more light. I feel like an ardent suitor who cannot win my love’s heart.
The Slow Joy of Guarding the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Bringley’s gift is to make the scholarly approachable—and delightful. In that decade at the Met, he developed a method. Rather than hunt for some extraordinary characteristic highlighted by the experts, he does nothing, just stares, spending those first minutes in a work of art’s presence by absorbing all he can without attaching any initial judgment, and he refuses to worry about what the art-world elite think.
Slouching Toward Chatbots
In some ways, we seem to want AI to replace us. Or at least to replace the people too foolish to fall in love with us or too impatient to adore our flaws.
Seeing The Doctor
“The Doctor” mocks identity politics even as it turns them against us, casting women as men and White actors as Black characters. After years of all of us choosing up sides, art proves the project impossible.
The Case for Travel
Travel, done with an open heart, stitches new connections. It is a way to not feel lonely.
Old—and New—New York
Few of us know New York inside-out. That means we are all in this together, looking hard, following breadcrumbs and tips and our GPS. I inhale deeply and realize the city runs on coffee and cannabis.
The Cooper Hewitt: Peace, by Design
Moving through the exhibit—pausing, stunned, at one project after another—you realize just how powerful design can be, and how many ways it can work.
The Elevation of the Penis
Why? Why, why, why, would men put themselves through such a risky surgery, inserting something static into an organ that expands and contracts? What made size the ultimate measure of a man?
New York Jazz, Serendipity, and Vijay Iyer
Iyer’s introduction is low-key, almost diffident, and he starts softly, his fingertips barely brushing the piano keys. There is a thoughtfulness in his demeanor, a gentleness.
On Returning to a Quiet Life (with Virginia Woolf’s Help)
“The Common Reader” honors Woolf with its very name, so I let myself pause and read the essay slowly. At the start of this forgotten diary, I learn, she was staying at her country home in rural Sussex, with “men mending the wall & roof” of the house.
How Trash Transformed into a Tangible Metaphor
The desolation that troubled T.S. Eliot comes from a soulless industrial greed that has yet to explode into wanton consumerism. He is mourning spiritual and intellectual decay. I am mourning the trash we then generated to fill that emptiness.