Marriage is an Institution for the Rich
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.
Dispatches
Moths Are Not Romantics
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.
Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Have Evolved Yet Again
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.
Cahokia Jazz Revives Our Lost City—and Our Best Music
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.
Anselm Kiefer’s Appetite for Destruction
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.
What Miniatures Can Reveal
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.
Unexpected Mardi Gras Moments in St. Louis
I was surprised to discover, having moved north from French-Catholic Louisiana, where I experienced three distinct types of Mardi Gras celebrations, that St. Louis residents liked to say they had the second-largest Mardi Gras celebration in the country after New Orleans, as if it was inevitable, based on historical ethnicity.
How Esther Perel Figures People Out So Fast
Esther Perel knows both pain and resilience: her parents were the only members of their families to survive Nazi camps. She is not afraid, as I often am, to cut into the pain.
Will Walking-Around Knowledge Save You?
In the digital age, something strange has happened to people’s perceptions of their own walking-around knowledge. Perhaps they feel the walking-around has been accelerated and covers more ground.
Watching Rashomon in the Age of Disinformation
The flip side of Kurosawa’s great film, revealing a murder mystery to solve, is also a world in which the search for truth, however difficult or naïve, must never be abandoned.