I miss finding a Christmas tree: the excursion, hopefully in the snow; walking up and down the assembled forest, looking so closely—too scrawny, not fat enough, crooked, ahhh—here’s one that’s perfect! Never perfect, in the literal sense, because it is real, and as flawed as we are.
“These twigs could be a Rorschach inkblot test!” I told him. “I keep seeing human figures in them. . . . ” Robert Cloninger, a psychiatrist and a geneticist at Washington University in St. Louis who has studied the evolution of human creativity and pattern recognition, was not in the least bit surprised.
We have lived on the Gulf and watched hurricanes organize off the swell of West Africa, grind their way across the expanse of the sea, thread their way through and over the islands, and turn north on the current to hit our coast. We have lived on the Atlantic and…
“It’s not really play that makes you feel good,” Csikszentmihalyi realized, “but the playfulness which can be in play.” Once you experienced that relaxed, utter absorption, you wanted to feel it again and again.
Directors (like political handlers) can hesitate to be blunt, afraid to say, “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.” Because it is safer or easier to let it ride, the mumbling is indulged.
Joseph Stalin’s funeral procession, from ‘State Funeral,’ Atoms & Void Productions A fascinating 2019 documentary called State Funeral is available now on MUBI, but be forewarned: the film literally moves at the speed of a dirge, as it shows the public funeral of Joseph Stalin, who died…
Language fails. Cecilia, however, does not. She mixes each cocktail in perfect proportions—never a little heavy on the booze, to loosen you up, or lightly, when your request slurs.
An AH-64 Apache from the 101st Airborne Division’s Combat Aviation Brigade. U.S. Army photo by Capt. Jarrod Morris, TAAC-E Public Affairs A few months ago I asked the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles, if I could ride around with their Combat Aviation Brigade (CAB) for a week, in…
Whenever we create structure and limitations, we are building ourselves a playground, a contained space in which it will be safe to play. That happens in an arena, a temple, a magic circle, a court of justice; at a temple; at a card table; on stage, on screen, on a tennis court.
Reading Shirley Chisholm’s 1973 book “The Good Fight” was something of a revelation for my students, as it offered not just an insider’s view of Black political thinking and organizing in the early 1970s but also a look at how a major institution like the Democratic Party operates and how difficult it is to mount what was in Chisholm’s case a true insurgent candidacy.