What Lies Beneath “Dignity”
Why the French value dignity and the United States despises it. (Only a slight exaggeration.)
Dispatches
Why Can We Not Admit That the 1990s Was The Greatest Decade?
We seem unable to acknowledge the greatness of the 1990s not because we cannot remember its halcyon spirit but because we refuse to.
Radiant Mischief at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame
Do conservative Catholics even realize what inspired these gorgeous vestments?
Time is the Book That Lets Us Endure Our Fate
As with our lives, we must savor the enduring, through time.
Sacred Monotony
This thing that I had avoided for years, that our entire culture avoids, turned out to be, overused but accurate word, transformative.
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.