Photo by artistmac, Wikimedia Commons. I had a piece to write, about the Mississippi. Flat shining basins, filled with river water made to slow its roll, lay on the other shore. I chose to write it because that stretch of river made me uneasy. Facing it, you know.
Extricating the female body from sexual desire altogether would be a societal wardrobe solution—but I doubt that is what anybody wants, even if it were possible.
We follow an identity, a persona, for what it brings us in digital form. We change our own identities, too, adopting a handle or username that no one will connect to the dork paying taxes on a ranch house in Poughkeepsie.
The curators of News on the Web did us a painful favor when they collected the new words of the past decade.
O’Farrell avoids naming Shakespeare in her novel, calling him “the tutor” when Agnes (Anne Hathaway to us) falls in love with him. This lets us avoid all the pompous scholarly baggage and know him as a young man driven by his love of language and theater, his gifts of wit and knowledge.
Most days, beauty opens doors—it makes people assume success and virtue and want to offer favors and opportunities. It attracts. But even that has an endpoint: Studies show that beautiful women hit a glass ceiling even faster.
“Here we are in Lake Charles, feeling like we are living out the book of Job in the Bible,” a Facebook friend wrote this week. “God has smitten us again.” “Who else is tired of Survivor Lake Charles?” someone else wrote. After a year with two hurricanes…
Ridgway devoted his life to creatures that soared and glided, trotting after them through mud and storms, ever vigilant, and detailing and comparing and never giving up. No one has described as many North American bird species, let alone illustrated them himself.
Photo by Michal Balog on Unsplash There often has been a sense of respite in quarantine for some of us lucky enough to have remote jobs and children who get along in tight quarters. The period leading to Covid was rough, too, after all, and my self-assignments to see…
The booth represents a refusal to fling away old technology—and the memories it triggered. Curious whether the phone booth ever made the local news, I check the Republic-Times archives and learn that this phone booth is new.