So it turns out that the figure of the “strongman” is ascendant once again in contemporary history. Putin in Russia, Xi Ping in China, Kim (Jong Un) in North Korea, Erdogan in Turkey, Orbán in Hungary, Mohammed (bin Salman) in Saudi Arabia, Bukele in El Salvador. And of course Trump here in the United States as a kind of wannabe dictator who openly admires others on that list and often muses on dreams of becoming one of them. What unites all these men is a fierce desire to govern by the exertion of their own will, along with disdain for…
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Irish poet Seamus Heaney made a previous appearance on this page more than five years ago with his poem, “Doubletake” So here we will engage in our own doubletake of enjoying another of Heaney’s gems, this one from a series of eight 14-line sonnets that he dedicated to his mother under the heading, “Clearances.” The series appeared in his 1998 collection, “Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996.” Since the sonnets are all printed consecutively, they have no separate title, and are known only by their number and first line. Thus the odd-looking headline atop this post and the poem below, with only…
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So I got Chappell Roan in front of me for the very first time when I decided to follow an impulse to check out the fashion getups at Sunday night’s Grammy Awards show. One never knows what might appear there as “clothes,” however scanty, billowing, or seemingly fitted for extraterrestrial giants they might be. Landing on the page, I beheld Ms. Roan’s utterly ridiculous looking “gown” (THIS IS THE GRAMMYS, after all!), which the “New York Times” described thusly: “Ms. Roan arrived in a burgundy, opaque chiffon cape, a custom design by Mugler, that perfectly matched the color of her…
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Like multi-millions of other Americans, I spent much of the weekend thinking about Alex Pretti. Combing through countless media reports, checking for up-to-the-minute alerts, trying, flailing, really, to write something coherent yesterday that would bring a modicum of ease and a shred of understanding to the awful scene of his murder. Abhorrent as it is, I kept cueing up the raw video footage and still photos, as if at some point I could finally come to some halfway sensible conclusion about how it all came to this. How it is that eight masked, heavily armed and armored agents of our…
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The most profound spiritual truths in the world can usually fit on a bumper sticker. That doesn’t mean they’re easy to put into practice, “Simple, not easy” being the profound truth of that matter! But in general, if we manage to faithfully follow a set of core maxims in our daily lives, we will very likely die happy and content in the knowledge we have fulfilled our most basic human obligation: to have lived a decent life. “Be kind,” “Love thy neighbor,” “Practice compassion,” “Show mercy,” “Express gratitude,” “Dare to hope,” “Spread joy,” “Tell the truth,” “Commit to something beyond…
