The most powerful variable here is fear. The woman in Mankato may have been high on a substance that can cause erratic and violent behavior, but she seemed happy and absorbed in her own pleasure, and one look told the officers they did not have to worry about a concealed weapon.
Lear is too big to be contained—but so are greed, power, and despair. This production is not a cheesy attempt to “make relevant” by dreaming up cool costumes and picking a fun place and time.
A new name or new spelling, new avatar, new sexual orientation, new status, filtered photo—the self is a work in process. The most we did was try on crazy outfits, sweating in tiny dressing rooms and tossing stuff over the walls to each other. These kids try on whole identities.
Are we at the mercy of our machines, then? This is the crux, the reason I could not swat away this buzzing frustration. It feels helpless in a way that is bigger than the issue at hand.
Extricating the female body from sexual desire altogether would be a societal wardrobe solution—but I doubt that is what anybody wants, even if it were possible.
There is a reason we use the word “intimate.” Sex cuts closer to our core than any other physical act. It can rip away the garb and the façade, break through the boundaries, ease loneliness, soothe anxiety, restore a sense of self.
We follow an identity, a persona, for what it brings us in digital form. We change our own identities, too, adopting a handle or username that no one will connect to the dork paying taxes on a ranch house in Poughkeepsie.
The curators of News on the Web did us a painful favor when they collected the new words of the past decade.
O’Farrell avoids naming Shakespeare in her novel, calling him “the tutor” when Agnes (Anne Hathaway to us) falls in love with him. This lets us avoid all the pompous scholarly baggage and know him as a young man driven by his love of language and theater, his gifts of wit and knowledge.
Most days, beauty opens doors—it makes people assume success and virtue and want to offer favors and opportunities. It attracts. But even that has an endpoint: Studies show that beautiful women hit a glass ceiling even faster.
Ridgway devoted his life to creatures that soared and glided, trotting after them through mud and storms, ever vigilant, and detailing and comparing and never giving up. No one has described as many North American bird species, let alone illustrated them himself.
The booth represents a refusal to fling away old technology—and the memories it triggered. Curious whether the phone booth ever made the local news, I check the Republic-Times archives and learn that this phone booth is new.