The “war against water,” the Dutch struggle to wrest their country from the sea, is strangely invisible now. Concerns about global warming are just that, global. The little local struggles — the rush to get the livestock to higher ground, the nervous pacing along the village dam — belong to dangers from olden days, like…
Accept my greetings, ancient scrolls, and favor my kiss in your dusty slumber. From sailing to foreign isles my soul has returned, and like a wandering dove, trembling and with weary wings, once more it knocks at the entrance to its childhood nest. Do you recognize me? I am he! Your bosom-child from way back,…
What does piety have to do with public health? In several recent rulings concerning restrictions on in-person religious services during the pandemic, the Supreme Court has repeatedly confronted the question, but it is hardly a new one. Humans have probably been asking similar questions for as long as they have clustered together in sufficient densities…
THE ETHICS OF BREAKUP I have only ever had one friend as crazy as I am. Once we painted a giant fireplace onto the wall of her apartment as decoration for a dinner party we were hosting — and then, at the end of the party, she led our guests up the stairs onto the…
Don’t we shudder when we think that in a time of popular emotion all it takes is a word, just one word imprudently spoken without hatred by an honest man, to provoke so horrible a murder? EUGÈNE SUE, THE WANDERING JEW The most illuminating book ever written about social media was published in 1895. It…
“A certain famous man said that Josquin produced more motets after his death than during his life.” So joked the German music publisher Georg Forster in 1540, nineteen years after the death of Josquin des Prez, the most celebrated composer the world had known. He had lived and died admired and respected, then as now….
Back when I was a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man I found myself able to summon a range of emotions that ran the gamut from common to not-so-common. The checkout person at H Mart trying to scan my fish sauce puts me in mind of a Roman housewife trying…
Ain’t that God’s own truth? Just one more flame-streaked roadster fresh from the spray-booth.
1 Any one of these masked avengers might be moonlighting as another Captain Rock, might set out not only to censure but incinerate a rich farmer dreading his knock at midnight, a cowpuncher, a calf-drencher, a dweeb journalist, a helmetless jock courting death by misadventure, a negotiator trying to break the deadlock between boss and…
Every day putting a fresh spin on how he maintains that shit-eating grin despite his notoriously thin skin. The quagmire of what-might-have-been. Every day shouldering an invisible tray. Hello, hello. Olé, Olé. His musing on how best to waylay a hiker passing through a field of Galloways. Every day aiming to swat the single fly…
There was a pounding in my dream. Could it be the surging chant of the Crystals’ killer line, “And then he kissed me”? It seemed to me I was about to have the wild gaze and wilder hair of Natalie Wood or Harpo Marx descend on me. But as I awoke I realized that the…
“Purity of heart is to will one thing,” Kierkegaard famously proclaimed. He was right about purity but wrong to aspire to it. It is a common mistake, made all the more familiar to ordinary people because it is a quality that heroes and fanatics, the characters who spice religious liturgies, history books, novels, poetry, and…
