We held our own against the Soviet Union as a Cold War superpower, only to have an impoverished Russia influence our president and our elections. What if we make it through our latest civil rights revolution, only to have some dudes in aloha shirts blow us up?
“If we winter this one out, we can summer anywhere,” the Irish poet Seamus Heaney once wrote. The phrase is now relevant in a way he never anticipated. That is not surprising; poetry pushes past a poet’s limits to trespass on the universal. And thanks to COVID-19, the whole world…
There is something almost magical about a display of humble, well-used tools, as a physical manifestation of a life and calling. It is evidence of the culling of what does not work, and the re-use of and care for what does. It reminds that the tool is not the knowledge, but that which permits knowledge to act; it shows a piety to craft, and a mastery like saintliness of an art.
“Elsevier says it is investigating how one of its journals managed to publish a paper with patently absurd assertions about the genetic inheritance of personality traits,” I read in the newsletter of Retraction Watch, a brilliant ten-year-old project undertaken by two scientists. Regularly appalled by what passes for research, they…
The latest reading of "The Princess Bride," in support of Democratic victory in swing-state Wisconsin, was fun to watch but had its share of lags, unsynched voices, dead mics, pixellated video, and the tops of heads of people reading from texts. That is to say, it perfectly mimicked the Zoom meetings of our time.
A woman slips on her boyfriend’s cotton shirt, its shoulders dropping inches below hers, and rolls up the long, long sleeves. She looks even more feminine. A man borrows his girlfriend’s soft blue pashmina, swinging one end over his broad shoulder. He looks far less masculine. I am using traditional…
Any day now, I will slip on something I loved and find it no longer fits or even suits me, after this feral reprieve and all the stress cookies. Yet I miss what those clothes used to mean, the idea of them, the feel. The missing is not vanity; I am hardly a clotheshorse.
Screenshot of YouTube video by News2Share in August. The title essay of Tatyana Tolstaya’s Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Russia and Russians is an account of the changes in feeling toward Russian writers, within Russia, over time. The essay questions the writer’s role, as artist and as citizen, and…
The new movie shows Bond has retired since we last saw him. I am interested in that narrative problem too. How does an untouchable retire, as if he had passed his career as a middle-school teacher? What does he do all day? Where? With whom? Can he sleep?
A pandemic and a war, a pandemic and a civil-rights revolution … Only the shapes of crisis change. Human nature does not.