Blogs

Starbuck has been trying on new emotions lately, pretending he’s mad or upset or joyous, then believing his invented states. “You can’t have any juice right now,” Mrs. Churm tells him. ...

He was the best of us, as they say, but that’s not claiming much moral high ground. Back in what’s now called the Reagan-Bush Era, I served in U.S. Army deep-sea dive detachments at Ft. ...

My preceding post was about a collection of poems by an 18th-century Vietnamese concubine, Ho Xuan Huong, who wrote in an ideographic script a thousand years old that’s now nearly extinct in ...

01HXH Back at the end of February I set out to blog about Spring Essence, a collection of poems by an 18th-century Vietnamese concubine named Ho Xuan Huong, whom the Utne Reader calls “one of ...

Flowers It was blessedly cool and bright today, and I walked over to campus, where I haven’t been in weeks. I had no pressing business there but needed to get away from this house, this ...

Murray Sperber writes in Declining by Degrees that an “Academic Arms Race” began in the post-Sputnik boom-era for higher ed. Colleges aspired to be universities, and universities competed for ...

library_24323_lg A devoted reader writes to ask, “What should I be reading this summer?” I too like reading lists. They’re the equivalent of standing in other people’s houses, reading ...

beach3 There is a heaven after all crow2 Studies find that fast food tastes best when eaten by tropical crows

We’ll be traveling for a few days, and I expect my posts to be intermittent next week, so here’s a long tale about how we’re educated into responsibility. A few years ago, Miss Wallace and ...

I didn’t grow up with a father, so my two sons have exactly as much experience with actual fatherhood as I do. What we’ve learned together is that fathers are mercurial, full of farts and ...