Sacred Monotony
This thing that I had avoided for years, that our entire culture avoids, turned out to be, overused but accurate word, transformative.
Dispatches
Small Things Like These is Christmas Forever Imagined
‘Small Things Like These’ neither lifts the heart nor breaks it. Instead, it is a quiet story suspended in the hopes of what Christmas might mean in years to come—and could mean now, this very year, if and when we find courage enough to search for it.
Stop Trying So Hard!
Oliver Burkeman wants us to work four hours only, relax about to-do lists, and realize what we expect of ourselves is already impossible
Of Vacation
If fate gave me a job so well-fitted that when I take time off I do most of what I would do anyway, why bother with vacation?
Richard Powers Makes Your Brain His Playground
Spoilers can be justified: without them you will need to go back and read this whole gorgeous book all over again.
How Artists’ Palettes Have Changed–and How We Have
Colors drawn from nature are now synthetic and often garish...much like our daily life.
Christmas Creep Has Left Us Confused
Like children, we rush the season, celebrating each holiday long before it arrives and growing sick of all of them. Sure, greedy retailers—but does the problem go deeper?
Requiem for a Punster: Leonard Slatkin Pays Tribute to P.D.Q. Bach (and Peter Schickele)
On Monday, November 25, Leonard Slatkin and the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis will present D.BachL, presumably pronounced “debacle,” a tribute to the composer Peter Schickele.
How Our Mail-Order Age Warps Time and Desire
Romantic anguish, or desires, are set off within seconds via texts. Consumer fulfillment is stretched like taffy whenever we check tracking services on an order. If you endure the returns process waiting in line at the post office, or Amazon returns location, it becomes a sentence on a desert island. Never will the two points of fulfillment meet.
We Drink So We Can Trust Each Other
The three-martini lunch, once standard, turned scandalous in the seventies, hastily replaced by light beer and wine coolers. Then came a defiant resurgence of glam cocktails and cigar bars, followed by a wave of sober-curious shaming....