Madame X
I loved John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X the instant I saw it. The subject, I imagined as a coolly aristocratic Frenchwoman in her early thirties. The artist was a man half in love with her—and half in hate.
By Jeannette Cooperman
An Elegy for the Literary Lunch
When you look across the table, above the Domaine Laroche Chablis, pan-seared-whatever, and caramelized cheesecake, you see the encouraging, hopeful face of someone who believes in you. Someone who will read every word of your manuscript and think about how to make it better.
Turning Spit to Silk
Sea silk’s fascination is its rarity, but also its impossible lightness. You cannot even feel it resting in your palm.
Starry Starry Skies (No More)
Seven years ago, scientists took measure and reported that 80 percent of the world’s population (and 99 percent of those in the United States and Europe) lives under skyglow. Put more starkly, “the majority of children born in North America today will never see the Milky Way.”
The Technium, and how Kevin Kelly Changed His Mind
Thirteen years ago, Kevin Kelly outlined three near-future scenarios for tech’s complexity.
The Cruellest Month
If you were practicing the denial we all need just to get out of bed every morning, enjoying the spring sunshine until you heard those words, consider that you are not recovering from a nervous breakdown, as Eliot was, and Europe has not just been devastated by World War I. Some pain cannot be denied.
Busload of Books
First Book, a nonprofit in D.C., is storing and shipping books so that at each visit, every child receives a fresh, shiny new hardbound book instead of the worn, stained paperbacks they are usually given. Build-A-Bear has joined the partnership to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary, and is giving 125,000 additional books—and 125,000 “reading buddy” teddy bears—to Title I schools across the country.
Breeding Tells
When breeders are only concerned with appearance, they may be allowing beautiful animals to pass on traits that predispose them for aggression: reactivity and fearfulness.
We Are Flesh and Bone and … Data
Handing over your data is as obligatory as a patdown by law enforcement; we resist at our own risk.
Defiant Happiness
Does joy flow from temperament, then, or from grace? What does it matter? Joy defies gravity. Poised at the edge of a cliff, you need it more than ever.
Why Woke Language Backfires
If this is our notion of inclusivity, we are doomed.
Being Funny
There are indeed joke-telling and joke-writing techniques, but the comic sensibility cannot be taught. Finding something funny in the first place—seeing the absurdity, the irony, the analogy, the edge—is what matters, and it emerges from a combination of detachment, affinity, and wry intelligence.