Usually I need coffee, pastry, and an uninterrupted hour to properly read one of L.M. Sacasas’s essays in The Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology, culture, and morality. They are dense, brilliant, and provocative, and they refuse to be skimmed. But recently Sacasas…
Nichelle Nichols, aka "Star Trek"'s Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, represented a miracle. In a decade that saw Black people beaten, jailed, and killed for wanting to vote, when laws effectively recognizing husbands as their wives’ bosses were still on the books in some states, what reason was there to think a Black woman would show up on TV as the equal of her White male colleagues? And yet there she was. There she is, always.
Paging slowly, almost reverently, I felt more than the curiosity “Affinities” does such a good job of provoking. I felt, to my surprise, peaceful. We have all been asking the same questions, living with the same flaws and troubles and joys, for centuries.
Enter the famously cocky French journalist and author Emmanuel Carrère. He is not stupid, though he can be full of himself, and he always notices what is going on. He pushes back in an essay called “The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm.”
Photo by John Griswold I suppose I should have known how appealing an old truck would be to some other people by my own reaction when I saw it at the curb. Ol’ Blue, an F-150 from the mid-1990s, was sitting with a For Sale sign in its…
Yellow traffic lights urge caution; yellow bellies nickname cowardice. Ships fly the Yellow Jack flag under quarantine. Perhaps because of the yellow tinge of jaundice, yellow is often used to suggest physical or mental illness.The dualism is ancient, but weirdly, as Sabine Doran points out in "The Culture of Yellow," fresh symbolism bloomed in the 1890s.
Cherries are about desire, not chastity. We pick them carefully, cherry pick them. Tasting and choosing, we graft our hunger to their reality.
Photo courtesy National Park Service, via Wikimedia Commons Some of my earliest memories, I realize now, are actually of time. The invisible wind making a wave that approached in the prairie grass; dappled light under the tree that changed with the incidence of the sun. The fatigue of…
When medieval monks felt bored (which was not yet a concept), they called it a sin: acedia. A spiritual deadness. There was no one to blame but themselves (or Satan), so they confessed and prayed back their liveliness. We, on the other hand, are connoisseurs, curators of happiness rather than holiness.
Sand itself is sterile; nothing grew on that beach. It was littered with driftwood and shells and odd marine creatures who had washed up there, like old men on park benches. But yes, it held a world.