I have started thinking of them as spaceships to nowhere. In my city, another one is always on the way; the latest touches down at 213 Bowery this fall. The last to arrive at that address, the SANAA-designed New Museum, was finished in 2007, the year of Obamamania and the iPhone and the first gentle…
A Conceptual Trash Heap Toni Morrison was wrong when she intoned that language is violence. But let’s give her this: the reckless use of words can do violence, idiomatically speaking, to clear thinking and therefore to political analysis. Slinging about words whose meaning is muddled, misleading, or tendentious — or whose usage is meant to…
In the summer of 1981, the novelist Italo Calvino published an article on the great books in the Roman weekly news magazine L’Espresso. “Why Read the Classics?” is classic Calvino: playful, charming, erudite, skeptical, humane. It consists of fourteen “suggested definitions” of a classic that deliberately contradict each other. Per definition one, the classics are…
On a warm Monday in June 1965, the Supreme Court declared that married women had the right to use contraceptives. This was a hard-won victory for Estelle Griswold, executive director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut and namesake of the case, Griswold v. Connecticut. She had previously helped displaced persons after World War II…
Lately, when I close my eyes at night, my thoughts strangely tunnel back to 2001 and one particular fireman. It was September, I was 22 years old living in New York and the world around me had turned to powder. Not the delightful dander of snow globe souvenirs or storybook Manhattan Christmases, but the dust…
Shakespeare’s mothers are often nasty. Lady Capulet ignores, then disowns, poor Juliet. Lady Macbeth would kill her child to gain a throne. Though they grieve (Constance in King John) it is vicious grief (Queen Margaret in Richard III). Sometimes they are terrifying: Volumnia raised Coriolanus to be a tyrant; Tamora encourages her son to commit…
I am about to flip a coin. Can you predict whether it will be heads or tails? You might have gotten it right. (It was heads.) But if so, you were lucky. Whether it would come up heads or tails depends on an assortment of factors that you could not identify before I flipped the…
I With war raging in Ukraine indefinitely and instability flourishing in the Middle East and trade wars overwhelming our relations around the globe — and more generally with American leadership in the world deafeningly absent — the world appears to have been so completely transformed by Donald Trump’s foreign policy that precedents may seem irrelevant…
When, later, our adventure has bogged down, or umbrella’s to an end, and mountains & lakes if any are the friends — and that reminds me of a story — and so does ‘if’ — Einstein — who personal’ never caught my fancy — he took my umbrella once, — or I took his —…
Yes. That is so. I found she hated then (or even didn’t) her father who left when she was a toddle of three. She hated her mother (I couldn’t like her either) and felt only a fully justified contempt for her one brother. Which into waded: me. Ran on her a morning en route to…
Waiting. Just waiting, in wet heat. A little more whiskey please. Turn the fan up. The amenities. No food yet, thank you. I’ll feel better later. It’s too hot to read. I think: do I have everything I need, stomach & mouth? A little more whiskey, please. In this terrible state I hope I’m paying…
Grim Pilgrims gather: ‘Thanks.’ I give thanks too, as the last leaves fly, that he did not live on but yellow & skin-thin & grinning ceased. True that his harvest due only was beginning, that no sun distracted his widow in her calm dismay; but count up then his gain, — Paris unfallen, Hiroshima tall, …
