The women who cracked German code during World War II must have gone home every night exhausted. I picture them in basement rooms, smoking, drinking coffee, working with scrunched foreheads until late at night. Now, with less camaraderie and thrill, we are all code-breakers, scrutinizing media to uncover its slant. I had […]
I was embarrassed every time my husband walked through the room and saw what I was watching. Three episodes earlier, I had admitted that both main characters were driving me nuts. That the con artist was charmless, the journalist an odd combination of schoolgirl emotionality and driven, self-centered obsession. That she actually […]
For years, I have deluded myself into thinking that the future hinged on attitude. Kids in poverty needed hope and a stronger sense of self, confidence, possibility. Those who were depressed or cynical needed to be grateful for what was good in life. Last week, I read a piece in Psyche by Jennifer […]
Oleg’s Choice: A Personal Look at the Conflict in Ukraine (Java Films, 2016) is an insightful profile of two young Russian men, Oleg and Max, who volunteered to fight without pay in the Donbas after conflict erupted there in 2014. It is directed by Elena Volochine, France 24’s Moscow Bureau Chief (now no […]
On this day, the fortieth anniversary of his untimely death, I come to praise Philip K. Dick, not to bury him. Despite PKD (as he is known to admirers near, far, and wide) only being 53 years old when he passed, on 2 March 1982, from a series of strokes that compounded […]
It has been strange, this last week, to feel as if the fears of the early ‘80s had skipped over several decades and landed in our time to confront us. When I was a young soldier, in the Reagan-Bush era, we used to shoot at Soviet soldier-shaped outlines at the range. Back then, […]
I fell in love with Lowell in college. I was seduced by the tautness of his language and the grandiosity of his worldview. “Skunk Hour,” with its painterly composition of a town in Maine, its deliberately pedestrian observations, its seemingly casual lineation, the incorporation of a song lyric (“Love, O careless love”) that […]
“The drumbeat of war.” Media outlets all over the world latched onto that phrase, and for weeks, its driving, propulsive beat moved the news of Russia and Ukraine forward. CNN let us hear from Ukrainian business leaders “as drumbeat of war grows louder”; other outlets noted that “Drumbeat of war is already hurting […]
One more article about how much we need sleep, and I will scream until dawn. We must have, they all insist, at least seven hours every night. Or we will lose our minds and die. There is, no doubt, some truth in this bossy advice. But I have struggled with insomnia since […]
The bravery and devotion to duty of the small State Border Guard Service garrison on Snake [Zmiinyi] Island, an outpost of Ukrainian territorial boundaries in the Black Sea, has been much on social media. When a Russian naval vessel, said to be the cruiser Moskva, demanded their surrender in the first day of […]
