Fashion dances back and forth, concealing then revealing, eroticizing certain parts of the body by first hiding them, then allowing tiny peeks. In a time of lace-up boots, a glimpse of ankle could sear a man’s eye. When décolletage became too common to excite, the midriff was revealed. Well, we have been covering our mouths […]
Dave “Tuffy” Cabusora has sold pop art online for ten years—full-time since 2017. He was afraid he might be driven out of business due to the pandemic and rising unemployment, but oddly enough, sales are up more than 100 percent this year over last. Now he has other concerns. Tuffy has mailed, on […]
When my turn came to pick for book club, I chose Sigrid Nunez’ The Friend almost at random. Okay, I chose it because there was a Great Dane on the cover. Also a reassuring gold seal: It had won the 2019 National Book Award. Still, I opened the novel with trepidation—I have picked some doozies, […]
The National Center for Education Statistics says there will be about 16.5 million students taking classes at undergraduate institutions this fall, which is down by six percent from a decade ago. Still, that is some four million freshmen, and by my calculation most of them were trying to move in to the dorms at […]
All this, and now champagne? The industry is in trouble, warns BBC News, Paris. After the perfect growing season—golden sunshine ripening the grapes at just the right pace; rain drenching the wines at precisely the time they thirsted, meaning they will burst with flavor instead of squishing and rotting. But “a billion bottles have been […]
Recent daytrips with my sons made me recognize a category of historical monument I had not considered much: the overenthusiastic mea culpa. The first was in my hometown of Herrin, Illinois. A stone recently erected in the cemetery marks the graves of “scab” workers murdered in 1922, during a mine strike. The second was […]
It has been too easy for me to roll my eyes at the slogan Make America Great Again. The instant objection—when, in its history of exploitation of humans and pursuit of stuff, was America ever great?—misses the point altogether. This is not a fact-based imperative, not even a truthy longing. It is anemoia, that wonderful […]
It is so unfair. If we screw up, it takes not one good deed to counterbalance the goof, but four. That, at least, is The Rule of Four described by John Tierney, a science journalist, and Roy F. Baumeister, a research psychologist, in The Power of Bad. They admit it is an average. In a […]
I am tired of being fifty-nine. It is a liminal, French-existentialist sort of age, a waiting for sixty—not unlike the limbo of pandemic, as I wait to contract the virus. So to hell with it. Today, I am eleven. Permission comes from a remark by the writer Madeleine L’Engle: “I am still every age that […]
“At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her […]
