I always find marsupials endearing, that cozy tucking of the baby into the pouch. Even more endearing: Opossums gobble up what we revile—snails, slugs, spiders, cockroaches, rats, mice, and snakes, not to mention about 5,000 ticks, many of them disease-laden, every season.
Respect does not mean staying silent about injustice in order to keep a fragile peace. But are yard signs meaningful speech, or just a lazy, self-indulgent shortcut that will only piss people off?
Trees have felt significant, relational, to poets and priests and philosophers for centuries. The symmetry of this partnership is surprising, when you think how lopsided the scales are: Trees shade and shelter and furnish and feed us, and we … clear-cut them. Or hug them and get mocked. Or alter the environment, and watch them charred by wildfires or pulled up by their roots.
Think of the difference signaled by leather versus cloth, or by a high, winged back versus a task chair. There are department chairs, board chairs, endowed chairs—why did we steal that word for humans in charge? No one takes direction from a department sofa.
Is it an American thing that we fawn over glitzy celebrities but pay scholars less overt attention? In France, intellectuals are invited guests on talk shows. In Ireland, literature is sacred.
In the painful days, women dressed for men. Then we realized men did not much care, and we began dressing for the people who gave us compliments—other women. Now, at long last, we are doing what every three-year-old demands to do: dressing for ourselves.
We held our own against the Soviet Union as a Cold War superpower, only to have an impoverished Russia influence our president and our elections. What if we make it through our latest civil rights revolution, only to have some dudes in aloha shirts blow us up?
“If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere,” the Irish poet Seamus Heaney once wrote. The phrase is now relevant in a way he never anticipated. That is not surprising; poetry pushes past a poet’s limits to trespass on the universal. And thanks to COVID-19, the whole world…
“Elsevier says it is investigating how one of its journals managed to publish a paper with patently absurd assertions about the genetic inheritance of personality traits,” I read in the newsletter of Retraction Watch, a brilliant ten-year-old project undertaken by two scientists. Regularly appalled by what passes for research, they…
A woman slips on her boyfriend’s cotton shirt, its shoulders dropping inches below hers, and rolls up the long, long sleeves. She looks even more feminine. A man borrows his girlfriend’s soft blue pashmina, swinging one end over his broad shoulder. He looks far less masculine. I am using traditional…
Any day now, I will slip on something I loved and find it no longer fits or even suits me, after this feral reprieve and all the stress cookies. Yet I miss what those clothes used to mean, the idea of them, the feel. The missing is not vanity; I am hardly a clotheshorse.
A pandemic and a war, a pandemic and a civil-rights revolution … Only the shapes of crisis change. Human nature does not.