In 2014, Anthony Bourdain’s CNN show, Parts Unknown, travelled to Massachusetts. He visited his old haunts from 1972, when he had spent a high school summer working in a Provincetown restaurant, the now-shuttered Flagship on the tip of Cape Cod. “This is where I started washing dishes …where I started having pretensions of culinary grandeur,”…
I On the third week of America’s quarantine against the pandemic, a new think tank in Washington had a message for the Pentagon. “The national security state, created to keep us safe and guard our freedoms, has failed,” Andrew Bacevich, the president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told viewers on a Skype video…
“Whoever knows the nature of the name… knows the nature of the thing itself, ” Plato observed in his Cratylus. To know is a complex verb, difficult but rich. According to the dictionary, it means “to have news of a thing,” “to know that it exists or what it is.” In classical languages, the concept…
Wednesday, April 8th…a date etched in black for socialists and progressives, marking the end of a beautiful fantasy. It was on that doleful day that Senator Bernie Sanders — acknowledging the inevitable, having depleted his pocketful of dreams — announced the suspension of his presidential campaign. It was the sagging anticlimax to an electoral saga…
Long ago I was born. There is no one alive anymore who remembers me as a baby. Was I a good baby? A bad? Except in my head that debate is now silenced forever. What constitutes a bad baby, I wondered. Colic, my mother said, which meant it cried a lot. What harm could there…
Gustav Mahler: the face of a man wearing glasses. The face attracts the attention of the viewer: there is something very expressive about it. It is a strong and open face, we are willing to trust it right away. Nothing theatrical about it, nothing presumptuous. This man wears no silks. He is not someone who…
I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest…. I’ve never been more loved and appreciated than when I tried to “justify” and affirm someone’s mistaken beliefs; or when I tried to give my friends the incorrect, absurd answers they wished to hear. In my presence they could talk and agree with…
The turbulent politics of the present moment have reached far back into American history. Although not for the first time, the very character of the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution have been thrown into question by the hideous reality of slavery, long before and then during the founding era and…
THE SECOND COMING Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate…
What blurt is this about virtue and about vice? Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent, My gait is no fault-finder’s or rejecter’s gait, I moisten the roots of all that has grown. WALT WHITMAN The Olympian gods are not our friends. Zeus would have destroyed us long ago had…
1. The first half having been given up to space, I decided to devote my remaining life to time, this thing we live in fishily or on like moss or the spores of a stubborn candida strain only to be gored or gaffed, roots fossicked out by rake or have our membranes made so permeable…
During Black History Month earlier this year, the New York City streetwear boutique Alife brought to market a limited set of six heather grey hooded sweatshirts made of heavyweight, pre-shrunk fourteen-ounce cotton fleece, with ribbed cuffs and waist. The garments, whose sole decorative flourish were the names of black cultural icons — from Harriet Tubman to…
