Professor Snyder is Not Fleeing the Country

      Dr. Timothy Snyder, an American professor of history at Yale, has been much in the news for deciding as “a scholar of fascism” to (variously) “flee,” “escape,” or “depart” the United States for Canada as “a prominent critic…of President Donald Trump.” That certainly sounds bad for the rest of us. In truth […]

Searching for a Loose Confidence

      Last week, I was on a panel. This, for me, is the equivalent of a tax audit, triggering raw, unwarranted terror. I did my usual stupid thing: wrote out all my answers to the posed questions and tried to memorize them. Then the organizer encouraged us to ad lib, go off script, […]

Dead Malls and Dreams

    I came of age walking around Northwest Plaza, a then-novel “outdoor mall” with a pebbly version of cobblestones and several courtyard fountains so hypnotic I had their shapes memorized. By “came of age,” I mean that I became a person who made her own choices. Not the early Montessori choices my mom cribbed […]

Anger Shows Us What We Protect

    A loud curse from upstairs, vibrating the air like a tolled bell. The dog looks at me, alarmed. “Oh, don’t worry,” I say. “That’s just Daddy.” Punching a hole through his cuff buttonhole with a pen because it is Monday morning, he is about to be late to teach a class, and everyday […]

How Roy Ayers Put Soul on “Nice”

        Born 1940 in Los Angeles, Roy Ayers never orbited the approximate longitude of the Mississippi Delta, Memphis, and Detroit that formed the connecting lines between Black gospel music, blues, and soul and rhythm and blues that would merge in Detroit to form the cultural phenomenon of Motown. A true fan might […]

What Elon Musk’s Baby Name Should Have Told Us

    Elon Musk’s fourteenth child was born last month. The names of the previous thirteen are deliberately unusual words charged with personal significance for their papa. The fourteenth’s name is Seldon Lycurgus. Seldon, for Hari Seldon, a mathematician in Isaac Asimov’s science fiction Foundations series. First Minister of the Empire, he develops a new […]

How Zelensky Might Channel Thucydides

      Every political moment has its tropes. Our current political moment has at least two. The first, used to describe any dizzying scale of change across time, stems from a reminder by Mexican poet Homero Aridjis ) though it is commonly attributed to a paraphrase by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin): “There are decades where […]