“Natural History Psychedelia”: Alexis Rockman’s “Great Lakes Cycle”
These works are about as subtle as a trainwreck, but they are surprisingly fun, despite their depressingly urgent call to take environmental responsibility.
Tax Season, Toil, and the Non-triumph of Work: A Meditation on Ecclesiastes
What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation.
Neighbors
On Sunday, I came across a body, lying by the side of the road—an expanding pool of blood seeping from the head.
Authorial, Historical, Ghostly, and Sad: The Many Voices of Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel
In some respects, Lincoln in the Bardo doesn’t really feel like a novel at all (despite the insistent subtitle), but is rather a carefully curated collection of voices that reside in some literary bardo between genres.
Hail Marys: Christmas Art History 101
Why this part of the story? Why is this heavenly exchange, from a narrative full of divine meetings, such a favorite in western Christian art?
Dulce Domum
But to return to reality, the sweet normality of home becomes sweetest after absence. The familiar is defined by exposure to the foreign and new.
Lend Me Your Ears: Podcasts
For a blog written by people between the ages of twenty-three and thirty circa 2017, it’s been a while since we’ve talked about podcasts.
It’s About Time
Time isn’t food, money, a place, or a feeling, or an object or a person—it just is. Despite a wealth of idioms, it’s still hard to talk about time and harder still to savor it.
Help!
I always tried to do the independent thing first—I’ll call my own tow-truck, I’ll look for my own apartment, I’ll find a job, I’ll pick a grad program.
The Best Things Happen While You’re Dancing
It was glorious. We started slow, but accelerated into more and more swings and twirls. The best dances are the ones with strange guys who happened to be very good dancers.
The Kingdom Belongs to Such as These
By mid morning, the classroom was really heating up. I turned on every available fan, shut off the the overhead lights, and opened the windows.
The Fat Lady Sings
In opera we spend time on what matters in life: the big emotional peaks and abysses.
Loving A Man Called Ove: A Book Review
Like many a literary grouch before him, Ove’s icy winter of life thaws before his final curtain.
Wunderkammer!
Nowhere else in this big wide world of ours can you find a life-size Michael Jackson and Princess Diana made entirely out of marzipan.
Silence: The Best NOT-Feel-Good Movie of the Year
Silence is dead serious about faith.
Grace and Humbugs
I never identified with Scrooge until this Christmas. It’s so easy to be Scrooge.
All’s Rarely Quiet on the Substitute Front
Never enter unknown territory without good instructions from the absent officer. Otherwise you will stumble into a jungle of twenty-four small people’s very specific needs and probably make severe tactical errors.
Why I Don’t Believe in Myself
The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. Who can know it? (Jeremiah 17:9)
A Saint for This Season
All human societies make heroes. Christians enjoy a cloud of witnesses to choose from—some ancient and some who bear the complexities of our own times.
My Flings with Absent Men
But, as a single woman with no romantic prospects on the current horizon, I’ve gained the most intimacy with two men I have never met.
The Takeaway from Photos
The village of Visnes boasts an unusual claim to fame—its now-defunct mine produced the copper used on the Statue of Liberty.
