What binds us together as Americans? It’s a question weighing heavily on the nation’s collective psyche as we enter winter and a holiday season unlike any other in anyone’s memory.

Through most of 2020, we’ve been enduring our own Twin Towers of catastrophe—a deadly pandemic that has altered most every aspect of our lives, and a calamitous presidential election, around which the incessant vituperation of the campaign has become even worse in its aftermath, and far more malignant for our democracy than anyone had previously been able to imagine.

Grievance and distrust are the coins of that realm, and once they start replicating like the viruses they are, the organism can be a long time healing.

Politically, we seem no longer to regard our opponents as simply wrong-headed or misinformed, but as soul-soiled, with evil intentions...

We are awash in babies here in our little corner of Durham, the bulk of them hovering, for this precious and brief stage, around the pre-walking and just-walking ages of 10 to 12 months or so. Hoisting themselves up by the side of their wagons or with a parent’s extended fingers, bouncy and jovial, taking a halting drunken step or two before plopping down on their diapered tushes.

Working to regain their footing as we come around the corner with our dog at the end of the leash, they stand and point and break into wide grins while uttering little “Uh, ooh, uh-uh-uh” sounds, all bouncedy-bounce, immensely pleased with the sheer fact of living and watching and exploring their ever-expanding world.

Portraits of innocence and pure being, sharing, in some ways, more in common with their peers of other species, be they lamb or kitten, puppy or chimp, than with the elders of their own, nicked and coarsened as thos...

We have lost—all of us. The whole country, everyone. Conservatives, liberals, libertarians, Tea Partiers, Antifa, you name it. No one has truly escaped the chaos, rivenness and rancor that abides after a relentless, four-year tsunami of invective and incompetence from on high.

All of us are dragged down and worse for the experience—even those who convince themselves otherwise, whose adoption of a near religious devotion to a cult leader defies rationality and the actual religion many of them claim to live by.

If they’re alive at all, that is. Upwards of 281,000 of us aren’t anymore, courtesy of a willfully, colossally mismanaged pandemic in which partisan politics was the sole consideration in the executive branch’s response.

We had heard incessantly that a swamp would be drained, and instead we are chest-high in mud, tangled in kelp, our breathing labored, our vision obscured, the horizon barely a...

Some music just grabs us as soon as the first sound waves they generate waft through the air on a remarkable (and nearly instantaneous) journey through our ear and nervous system. As those waves turn into electrical impulses that reach our brain, they have been known to cause visceral reactions that often include a primitive language response along the lines of “Mmmhhh” or “OhOhOh…”

The 17th selection in this semi-regular series of “Brilliant Songs” fits into that category like few other musical pieces.

‘Pavane’ continues to thrive as a standard part of the concert repertoire some 133 years after its debut for the most excellent reason that it engages human emotion from first notes to last.

“Pavane, Opus 50,” by French composer Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924), launches from its first violin pluckings (called “pizzicato,” a word I have always loved to say), soon joined by flutes into a dreamy melancholy so lush ...

A 12-year-old newspaper boy of a bygone era nears the end of his route and walks into a small cafe in the dark cold and rain of early morning to snag a cup of coffee. A few soldiers and factory workers are hunched at the counter while a man sits in a corner with his nose hovering over a beer. As the boy heads for the door, the man calls out to him, “Hey Son!”

The boy approaches tentatively, then recoils in confusion as the man lays one hand on his shoulder and uses the other to place it under the boy’s chin, the better to get a full look at him.

The boy snarls, “Say! What’s the big idea?”

Whereupon the man responds, “I love you.” 

Ah yes, the engineer, all acute observation and precision, gone all to mush in romantic love—probably human existence’s most inherently destabilizing, irrational experience, psychedelia X 10.

The scene sounds improbable in this age, in which the cafe proprietor and customers w...