Anger Shows Us What We Protect
“What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability."
Dispatches
How Roy Ayers Put Soul on “Nice”
Roy Ayers coasted on his unique sentiment and vibe. It was sublime, positive, and unfailingly warm and luminescent. What else would you expect a writer, any writer, to say about the musical talent who gave us the song “Everybody Loves The Sunshine”?
Symptoms of Windy Hypochondriacal Melancholy
"You listen constantly, in a kind of trance, for communications from your body; it is as if you have become a medium, and your organs a company of fretful ghosts."
What Elon Musk’s Baby Name Should Have Told Us
Names are significant for Elon Musk. And now, for all of us.
How Zelensky Might Channel Thucydides
It is anyone’s guess as to whether Ukrainian President Volodoymyr Zelensky has read ‘The History of the the Peloponnesian War,’ even if his words spill into realms that Thucydides, with his imperatives for the preservation of law and solidarity against violence and calamity, would recognize at once.
Most Points Wins
The goal is to make you feel slightly more virtuous, briefly. But why stop there? People are crazy, and times are strange.
Scatological Politics
The gut is a place of confusion. And yet, it remains our best guide....
We Doth Protest—Not Enough
Hey, was that a police car honking in support? Mmm. Probably not.
I Hate Nazis. Why Does Facebook Want Me to See Them So Badly?
Facebook’s algorithms, which drive what any of us see individually, are a mystery to most of us. At best they make us passive consumers; at worst, easy pupils to brain-train for nefarious ends.
The Universal, Demarcating Power of The Scream
By drawing a line between its disturbed central figure and the serenity of the two bystanders at the vanishing point of the painting’s perspective, The Scream asks us to question the “sanity” we pretend to hold on to.