Between my late teens and early twenties, when at last the finite nature of time and the seemingly infinite number of “Best Of” lists pressed on my mind, I relied on the book John Kobal Presents the Top 100 Movies (1988) to find a way through the yet undiscovered terrain of great […]
A Reddit thread Tuesday night lit up with rumors that Elon Musk was on the move again, this time to the VA (the Department of Veterans Affairs). Some commenters were freaking out. The worry was that Musk and his young disciples would push past security in order to access military service […]
“You know you have a crack in this back molar?” the hygienist asks, poking with a sharp thing. “Um…no?” She nods briskly, insists on showing me with a little mirror. “Wwwhat do we do about that?” I ask, using the plural to comfort myself. They are my team, right? We are all invested […]
Growing up, I shunned anything shaped like a heart, anything ruffled or bedazzled, anything pink. In the first two instances, my antipathy holds—unless the heart holds Godiva chocolates. But my own heart does a secret leap, like a kid embarrassed to love ballet and practicing in an empty room, whenever I find myself […]
With the increasing ubiquity of streaming media and those platforms’ strategies for cross-promotion, it becomes easier and easier to make new discoveries of old films and shows. That is how I recently discovered Sasquatch, a documentary series released on Hulu in 2021. Sasquatch follows a journalist as he follows the trail of […]
Someone told me once that I lived a monkish life. She meant something vaguely Buddhist rather than vaguely Catholic, I think, but when pressed she said only that I was bald, lived quietly, read books and wrote a lot, and liked to walk and cook as if they were meditative activities. I […]
It was about six months after the death of my mother that I finally mustered the courage to organize all the boxed and scattered family photos she left behind. Walking into a boutique, upscale stationery store, I spotted an embossed leather photo album hand-crafted in Italy. Its price shot way over my […]
The geranium is a Bette Midler sort, with a blowsy inflorescence of clustered pink blossoms tinged with pale orange. Irrepressible, she has stayed in full bloom since we brought her home more than a year ago. The New Guinea impatiens is just the opposite, a Maria Callas diva haughty about her […]
In the only recorded inter-species war in human history, the humans lost. Meet the victor. Skinny, leggy, frizzy-haired and feathered, with a long, pale blue neck, buggy amber eyes, and wings too short to fly. Instead, they flap when the emu runs, spindly legs blurring at thirty miles per hour. Emus may not […]
The Good Book has gained so much critical mass as a required read in U.S. public schools—most notably in Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana—that we could almost mistake it for a Marvel Movie franchise if not for its age. One of the first symptoms of texts as old as the Bible is […]
