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.
A whole lot of us are grieving—and as a result, feeling even more vulnerable, because sadness, in this culture, reads as weakness. And weakness scares us, because it means we are defenseless and powerless.
Clotheslines are at once homespun and ethereal, whether they are strung across apartment buildings in Brooklyn or overlook a field of sunflowers in the Midwest.
In 1895, Samuel Verner, a white man from South Carolina, moved to the Belgian Congo to work as a Presbyterian missionary. It seems he had a greater aptitude for acquiring human beings than saving souls. In 1904, he received a commission to bring a dozen people from the Congo to St. Louis to be exhibited at the World’s Fair.