“I studied rocks,” my friend Susan Barker likes to joke, especially when I press some inscrutable piece of contemporary poetry into her hand. In her doctoral studies, she focused on ways to get people excited about nature, and she is frustrated by all the paeans written by urban types who see a butterfly […]
Staring balefully into the bottom of an empty beer stein before he slides it toward the bartender, a stranger might—if he is on his third—tell me why he drinks. He might say he drinks because he is worried about his job, or his wife left him, or he cannot find any other […]
Disenchantment can mean many things: a resigned sigh, a thickly scabbed wound, a heartbreaking glimpse of Dad playing Santa, a marriage that replaces dinner dates and moonlight with Hamburger Helper and a toddler throwing up all night. But in sociology, disenchantment means something very specific: a cultural rationalization and devaluation of religion […]
All this talk of lost freedoms, yet no one mentions the most American freedom of all: speeding down a highway, windows down, hair blowing across your eyes but who cares because there are no other cars in sight, just the open road and a green blur of trees on either side. One […]
The Babushkas of Chernobyl is a 2015 documentary produced and directed by Holly Morris and Anne Bogart, which emerged from Morris’ earlier journalism and TED Talk about elderly women living in the shadow of the destroyed Chernobyl nuclear plant. It is available on several streaming platforms. Chernobyl became a household word in 1986 […]
A day in 2022: Count your steps. Check your points, check your apps, check your site and your pages. ❤ your likes. Spin a wheel for an online discount. Cash in your frequent flyer miles. Dig out last year’s loyalty card for the ice cream shop. Hunt for a coupon code. Do […]
Often, the traumas we fear will scar us do not. Severe pain, major surgery, getting fired or broken up with, wrecking the car, losing one’s faith, embarrassing oneself…the angst fades, and while we can recount the details and even laugh about some of them, the sting is gone. The same is true […]
National Geographic’s Becoming Cousteau (2021), directed and produced by Liz Garbus, is an interesting and timely feature-length biography of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. (The Odyssey, a 2016 film, was a biopic on his life, based on a nonfiction book.) Becoming is not a deep dive, so to speak, but it does certain things very well. […]
Lauren Groff was nervous about writing a novel set two thousand and ten years ago. This, I get. Even the prospect of writing a book set before smartphones feels daunting: so many details to reconstruct, an entire lifeworld that functioned in a radically different way. Lovely for the reader, though, to be […]
Think of how frantic you would be if you discovered your child had swallowed part of a mushroom they found at the playground. Or what if you caught your cat eating a new houseplant, or your dog ran through a bed of something in the woods and was pawing its eyes? One resource […]
