Snow Daze
Remember folding white paper again and again, then snipping it with blunt scissors to make a snowflake? The magic never ends.
Dispatches
The Frangible Beauty of Ceramics
The resemblances of ceramics with human life are poignant. People too get fired in the kilns of experience, and often we emerge flawed or get broken in time. Some are dun, some glazed or crazed, some repaired with stripes of gold. We are all sensuous as pots.
What Lies Beneath “Dignity”
Why the French value dignity and the United States despises it. (Only a slight exaggeration.)
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?