Corvairs Do Not Exist Anymore—And It is a Good Thing
Nader showed how even in a deeply consumerist society, consumers were being taken for a ride.
Essays
On the Importance of Changing a Tire
The more I learned about cars, the more I saw through the random “help” that was offered, and the more I was empowered to step away, to handle things myself.
On Cars as Art
When Italian carmaker Enzo Ferrari declared the 1961 British Jaguar E-type sports car the most beautiful car ever made, it was a rare instance of a functional design object coming to be seen as a work of art. Thirty-five years later, Ferrari’s assessment was vindicated when the original Jaguar E-type was put on display in the Museum of Modern Art.
Who Killed the World?
How exactly the world was killed might be a mystery, but the who seems all-too-obvious: men. Men and their consuming hunger for more power and more speed.
Conspiracy Poet in Outer Space
I am among the hopeless and deluded dreamers David Clewell believed in, and so I choose to believe that there is a starship in the sky that touches down and takes away great poets who were perhaps not as widely celebrated on Earth as their work deserved.
The Saga of Sin, or How We Moved From Renunciation to Remediation
How we think about sin changes over time—and how it changes reveals quite a lot about us. This is true across many religious traditions, but since Roman Catholicism is a vast repository of thought about sin and its sacramental erasure, I start there, like a drunk looking for keys under a streetlamp, to see how sin has evolved.
“Round and Round and Round You Go”¹
A friend told me he would visit a Chuck Berry house museum if it was filled with guitars. I said it was likely never filled with guitars when Berry was starting out, and it was important that the music came despite (or due to?) a lack of things.
Is Camp Still “Camp”?
Camp is brilliant at introducing irony where it once did not exist, but now irony exists everywhere; its distance and layering are our habitual mode of perception, absent only in cults and Waldorf preschools. What role is left for camp to play?
A “Botanical Pompeii” Beneath Our Feet
Until I brushed up against those 300-million-year-old ferns, I thought of coal and pollution and global warming as a single, dense lump of worry, uncomplicated by history or irony.