When someone in my book club chose Their Eyes Were Watching God as our next book, I was startled. I had not thought of that novel since grad school. But I dove back in, through the thicket of phonetic dialogue that today would be verboten, and found Janie all over again. Talk about […]
A year ago I wrote a review of a documentary about comic/actor Steve Martin, which I said portrayed his “lonely art and happy life.” “What emerges is a portrait of an anxious introvert acting like an extreme extrovert for fun and profit,” I said. “Martin seems to have been separated emotionally […]
There is a strange panic that sets in when you discover, to your abject horror, that someone you disapprove of likes—even adores—an artist or work of art dear to your heart. Perhaps we could compare it to the disgust of seeing your worst enemy date or marry someone you just broke up […]
After a two-hour conversation with a funny, literate Irishman on What’sApp and an interview with a young artist who uses ancient myths to inform his work, I finished the day exhilarated. This is what I have always loved most about reporting: the great conversations it makes possible. You live too much in your […]
Peck of Dirt just played a record release show of a unique kind. The band previously had released a record of the same material—also titled “Peck of Dirt”—eighteen years ago, so a baby born on that release date was graduating from high school when the second version of new recordings was released […]
Remember all those earnest dismantling-racism workshops? They went about it all wrong. They should have set race and guilt and privilege aside and asked participants to think of alternative uses for a brick. That is not entirely facetious. In The Ideological Brain, neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod cites research based on the Alternative Uses Test, […]
In the glorious fifties, that yearned-for destination of MAGA time travelers, my mother’s gynecologist prescribed Valium for her nerves. As a kid, I watched her slowly, shakily, pry herself free of them. It took years. In her seventies, the anxiety came back full force, so she nibbled tiny pieces of the lowest dose […]
After our entire book club, with unprecedented unanimity, pronounced Cutting for Stone the best book we had read yet, we waited twelve long years. Every few months, one of us would ask, “Hey, has Verghese written his next book yet?” Finally, The Covenant of Water came out. The man is a consummate storyteller. […]
It was the first time I heard a bosun’s whistle while lying on a rack aboard a U.S. Navy vessel. After we had been called to attention by the sharp sound of the whistle, it was our captain speaking—the commanding officer of the USS Saipan. Much to my surprise, he was […]
After living abroad for three decades, novelist Henry James returned to the United States in 1904 and 1905 to to be “a restless analyst” of all he saw in an ascendant America, which had changed greatly since he had left for Paris and London. The nonfiction book that came of the trip […]