The way we do things tells us a lot about ourselves.
I open envelopes by trying to pry the flap away from its glue. Failing that, I’m apt to insert a letter knife into a corner and slit open the top. But some people carefully tear off an end and pull the letter out the side. [...]
There are African elephants and Asian elephants, but nobody talks about The Great Invisible American Elephant whose herds roam the cultural scene.
There they are, standing in hospital waiting rooms, in news rooms, in class rooms, in back rooms. And here we are, navigating around them like waiters with a tray of cocktails over our heads. [...]
In the August 8th Times Literary Supplement there is a piquant 1936 photograph by Alfred Eisenstadt of four ballet dancers in a window at The School of American Ballet. George Balanchine, cofounder with Lincoln Kirsten of the school, had a famous penchant for tall, lithe women dancers. One can’t tell from Eisenstadt’s photo how tall [...]
Read More...Some people become ghosts before their time. They’re spoken about but avoided like sharp-edged furniture or a malodorous back alley. They’re painted into problematical corners, as if somehow they’re a problem which everyone knows but can’t name. It’s the kind of thing that happens when a wife starts calling a well read husband The Professor [...]
Read More...Are we becoming a land of belittlers and giggly sycophants?
I listened to John McCain, the man who promised us the high road, deriding Barack Obama’s innocuous admonition to pump more air into our car tires to get more mileage. McCain’s point was that Obama is silly, and there was giggly laughter from the audience. But [...]
When you search the web for Sinbad you’re likely to find David Adkins, the comedian, before you find that wealthy young sailor of Basra whose adventures are immortalized in The Thousand and One Nights.
When you search on Odysseus you find Homer’s mythological sailor immediately. We are, after all, Eurocentric, and worldwide accessibility to the web [...]
I don’t know what metrics social scientists use to measure a civilization’s progress and decline. But every time I hear the increasingly inane debate about flip-flopping, every time I hear a slogan or receive a swift-boat e-mail, I think of the progress bars on our computers.
We wait more or less patiently as software downloads or [...]
Our military academies have curricula of a very high order, so why are we turning to widespread use of mercenaries? What’s the connection, you ask, between good teaching and mercenaries? History teaches us that mercenaries are used when there isn’t enough support for a war at home and when great powers become exhausted, corrupt and [...]
Read More...There are certain days when things don’t hold their shape. This is not just a middle-age weight problem or distortion through a tear drop. It can happen in bright sunlight. People go convex and concave. Buildings seem to play with hula hoops. Sentences play hooky on their periods. Things are not exactly where they ought [...]
Read More...If you watch too much television you start dreaming about the scorned ex-lover of a victim’s fiancé and soon realize your life needs a continuity editor. Not that it matters because your advertising support is weak and your Nielsens are in the toilet. There’s no chemistry between you and the beautiful people whose misfortune is [...]
Read More...