Imagine the catharsis, for the gender that has been schooled for centuries to be good and sweet and nice. But girls are no longer forced to be demure—and no longer need bad boys to act out their unlived urges. So why does the appeal persist?
The play does well portraying one of the novel’s main conflicts: that Ahab cannot live without knowing, within the framework of his own understanding of cause and effect, and this tautological pride makes other beings suffer. His lust for vengeance is blasphemous chiefly because he cannot live in The Mystery without acting on some little part of it and calling it the whole—just like us.
I just listened to “Enchanted.” Taylor Swift did not yet know or love Travis Kelce when she wrote this song, and I have not met the man or wanted to do so, but I can now relate to the lyrics differently as someone who has seen his dead best friend come back to life in another man’s smiling face.
The monetization mindset extends far beyond hobbies. Taking the marketplace as our model, we cheerfully objectify ourselves and one another in all sorts of contexts.
While most proponents of marriage frame the problem correctly—as if it was not already obvious that married people are less likely to be lonely—they grab this thorny dilemma by the wrong end of the stick.
The moth-to-flame metaphor lasted for good reason. It colors our attitudes toward saintly masochism, heroic idiocy, great and stupid loves, magnificent obsessions that sop up people’s money and leave their families starved for affection and bread. And it leaves us as confused as the insects.
Rev. Billy started preaching in the late ’90s, outside the Disney store in Times Square, using the company as a symbol of mindless, life-destroying consumerism and unethical practices including sweatshop labor.This act, if it was an act at all, evolved in the two decades since 9-11 to become The Church of Stop Shopping and The Stop Shopping Choir.
It took a South African to restore and transform Forest Park. Now an Englishman has given us a Cahokia in which three groups intermingle—Indian, Black, and European—with precarious harmony.
Humor in the face of depictions as seemingly bleak as Kiefer’s is not far off the mark. There is no punch-line in “Burning Rods.“ Look carefully enough, though, and it is clear there is no distinct vanishing point, either.
In the world of miniatures, Kelly could make art that was comprehensive for her and for the viewer, tackling a topic that loomed large by shrinking it down to size, ordering, and controlling it. Thus she took the overwhelming, misunderstood, dangerous compulsion of hoarding, something nobody ever quite comprehends, and made it approachable.