I imagine most people have used Wikipedia. It’s a common go-to site for quick reference to find basic information about almost anything. It’s a free, nonprofit reference site supported by readers’ donations. In this age of growing feints and deceptions in social media, politics, and the Internet in general, Wikipedia’s entry on “Weasel Words”…
Harper’s Magazine has invited America to a season of national self-examination. The cultural struggles we are going through now are signs of progress. They are necessary if we are to continue to grow toward justice. But such changes are not supported by bumper sticker philosophies. They are nuanced and complex, and the following letter is…
Writing is something you can never do as well as it can be done. It is a perpetual challenge and it is more difficult than anything else that I have ever done – so I do it. And it makes me happy when I do it well. Ernest Hemingway BACK
The Migrant Caravan: Made in USA Roberto SavianoMarch 7, 2019 Issue Hondurans living at the Iglesia Embajadores de Jesus shelter in Tijuana while waiting for their US asylum applications to be processed, December 2018 The link in the title above will take you to an article in the new issue of the New York…
“And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what…
This morning’s New York Times editorial page carried this article by Jennifer Finney Boylan of Banard College, Colombia University in which she quotes Jonathan Swift (1667-1745): “The greatest liar hath his believers: and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work, and there is no…
“A mind once stretched by a new idea never regains its original dimension.” BACK
I’ve kept journals for decades, and recently while going through one nearly twenty years old, I came across this splinter from a forgotten sentence I’d jotted down, source unrecorded. There was only this penciled note: “I think from a newspaper article, or magazine article . . . an unexpected phrase of poetic beauty.” “. .…
aph·o·rism [ˈafəˌrizəm] NOUN a pithy observation that contains a general truth, a statement of some general principle, expressed memorably by condensing much wisdom into few words. Examples: “The child is father to the man.” (William Wadsworth) “Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.…
Years ago, in the spring of 1989, I was reading a new book I’d just bought by one of my favorite historians, Peter Brown, Rollins Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, and scholar of Late Antiquity. I was reading, The Body and Society, Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, and I’d just begun…