“Hope this email finds you, well…”
One of the many things they don’t teach you in adulting school is how to write an email to an old mentor who’s been forced to retire because: stage 4 cancer.
Against Opinion
Increasingly, because every opinion is about our personal Theory of Everything (and our social media brand), we make no distinction in orders of magnitude. An opinion about “whether or not Chris Rock deserved it” is as big on social media (if not bigger) than “whether or not Ukraine deserved it,” both real questions that opinion pieces have been written about. Never mind that both queries are absurdly reductive and relatively meaningless, in the twitterverse they have equal weight.
The Power of the Slog
I settled in and decided I’d watch Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog last night. The Power of the Slog is more like it.
Breaking Fast
Just saying hi for now.
Cover the mirrors
For RBG.
Speaking of…
The banality of the human god has deep roots in Christianity (the first depiction in art of God the Father as a human figure dates to the 4th century CE, around the time of the Nicene Creed). For most of my youth, I did not question why anyone would depict divinity this way. I didn’t understand religious metaphor.
Extraordinarily Normal People
Am I grieving? Is that what this is? Fiction that engages us deeply in the other can be “practice” for engagement with an actual other. It can also help us imagine love or practice grief. The Greeks, who invented Tragedy, obviously knew this. We need imaginary worlds to help us learn to live in the real one (and, perhaps, occasionally to transform it into one a little closer to what we imagine).
Schlemiel, schlimazel: why so serious, man?
There have been few characters in recent film as unfortunate as Larry Gopnik, the middle-aged professor of quantum physics, whose life is falling apart around him: his wife has kicked him out of the house and filed for a gett — a ritual divorce — so that she can marry recently widowed family friend Sy Abelman (the “Serious Man” of the title)….[SPOILERS AHEAD]
Breaking Away
I think I’m going to try to fix my bicycle today.
A Scythe of the Times
True story: After graduating college I set off with a dog-eared copy of Anna Karenina in my rucksack, inspired by the character of Kostya Levin, Tolstoy’s alter ego in the celebrated novel, to experience life as a migrant agricultural worker. Little did I know this would be the first stop on an incredible journey.
A Contrarian Seminarian 