The U.S. administration, destabilizing and unjustifiable in nearly all its actions, said Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “at its depth comes down to hero worship”—of Putin, Musk, Trump—but in the end we are sacrificing ourselves, “our children, our grandchildren, the possibility of life on earth….”
I had known her parents, and now all four of our parents were in their graves, and we were parents of grown children. We lived in the same metropolitan area. Why would it not be pleasant to sit together and imagine the futures that remained in each of our separate lives?
The goal is to make you feel slightly more virtuous, briefly. But why stop there? People are crazy, and times are strange.
Facebook’s algorithms, which drive what any of us see individually, are a mystery to most of us. At best they make us passive consumers; at worst, easy pupils to brain-train for nefarious ends.
Oksana Maksymchuk explained that she started writing ‘Still City’ in Ukraine, “maybe half a year before the actual invasion in the summer of 2021…and the Russian troops were amassing on the border, and we were assured that there would be nothing happening, but it seemed very threatening. I thought, ‘I’m going to write it as a kind of narrative about a non-event,’ something that I was sure would not take place.”
Crises come in specific forms, which might determine needs for an apocalypse house. Will you need a well or stream, and seclusion? Or a bus to a workplace and mutual aid groups? How comfortable do you hope to be? What will you do for leisure?
Zombie strips, they are called, drawn long after the original artist has died, and going through the motions for syndication. Bill Watterson, adored for his art and admired for his integrity against corporate newspapers and marketing, criticized this phenomenon. It is said Charles Schultz left instructions not to allow it to happen to his strip.
The brief promotional materials said it had something to do with Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.” I had hopes it would be live theater and that maybe Krymov would appear, if only remotely—he seems to have a new play in New York to promote—or that a scholar of theater or Slavic studies might be there to explain what was going on.
The small crowd waited for more, but when there was no more they turned to face the street, shouted slogans, and waved signs. It had the feel of a Harris support rally, as well as a referendum on the first sixteen days of Trump’s second coming.
‘Perfect Days’ (2023), directed by Wim Wenders, challenges us, starting with its title, to consider what it means to live an enlightened, fulfilled life.
Two years ago I wrote a short piece meant to be artful, so I went looking for an artful photo. I found it in an image by Wiki contributor Victor Albert Grigas.
How this volume of six hundred pages of Kazakh poetry landed in a town library in St. Louis’ Metro East is a mystery, but it has met its goal.