The United States is an extraordinary nation. Not an exceptional one, but an extraordinary one. It is not based on blood or history or religion. It is based on an idea, and on the rule of law. But if we do not agree on the implications of that idea or how that law should be interpreted, what are we?
Screenshot from a trailer for ‘The Dig.’ The problems for writers of historical fiction may be little different from those of anyone using “true events” as the basis of their stories. Sources may be more distant, but the real issue remains: which drama, among the welter of…
Koenig learned how to craft a sentence from the literary lions of Washington University (Gass, Elkin, Nemerov). He then became a foreign service officer, a reporter in the Washington bureau of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a press agent at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He knows a lot about the gathering of information—and the spreading of disinformation.
This doll, Maya, has nothing to do with barbiturates or sex or any of the other adult themes that washed right over me in the movie. Nor do her companions, who I discover are part of a series called Inspiring Women. I have rushed to the Barbie website, and tennis star Billie Jean King is here, along with astronaut Sally Ride, artist Frida Kahlo, NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, and activist Rosa Parks.
Richard had humanity, but he deliberately discards it, death by death. And while I cannot excuse his bleak, inexorable decision, I find myself mourning it with an empathy today’s politics have not engendered.
We have just broken a 4,000-year-old tradition that began with the ancient Babylonians.
After centuries of art and ritual, color symbolism is so richly layered that we can pick what we like, impose our own symbolism. Maybe Kamala Harris has ascended to our version of royalty, and the purple was her robe, sans ermine trim. Maybe she was preparing for a brazen old age, as clubby women do. Or bracing to be wounded in battle.
Empiricists love buffets, because they can peer at all their options, maybe even spoon something up and study it before deciding whether to take more.
Screen capture from NBC’s coverage of the Inauguration. Inaugural Day was bright and cold, with 200,000 small flags replacing an audience on the Mall, and the capital an occupation zone. The number of deaths from Covid passed 400,000, more than our WWII dead, as the sitting President winged…
Nearly everything in our culture, including companies and music and social media sites, is now forced to choose sides. I am right there keeping score and applauding, because too much damage has been done to talk fatuously of unity.