• Philosophy - Politics/Culture - Religion

    Squeezing the “Tao Te Ching” Into a Jam-Packed Week

    June 26, 2022 - By 

    All right, so that is a little joke in the headline, yes? Need I explain it? The ancient Chinese text emphasizing peace, stillness, patience, emptying the Self, the unity of opposites, being rather than doing, or at least being completely there in the doing? Squeezing that into one’s week? Funny, maybe a little bit? Tiny smile? I laugh in order not to cry. Or rage. Dear Tao, help me in my laughter. It is the tail end of a week that has seen renewedly breathtaking revelations of an ex-president’s overt and relentless attempt at a coup, followed by rapid-fire Supreme Court…

  • Music

    Tenth Annual Songs of Summer

    June 18, 2022 - By 

    Ten summers ago, this space decided to kick off the season by digging into the vault of popular songs devoted to the unrepentant joys and indulgences of summer. Fun season, fun music, fun blog post. Three songs had made that cut, with multiple readers sending in suggestions/lamentations about others that they thought should have. So when summer rolled around again a year later, it seemed right and proper and, well, traditional, to offer up a second volume. So here we are, 10 years in, the field of potential songs grown a bit thinner, most of the low-hanging fruit almost picked clean…

  • Poetry by Andrew Hidas - Politics/Culture

    Watching My Granddaughter’s Gymnastics Class While Congress Debates AR-15s

    June 12, 2022 - By 

    WATCHING MY GRANDDAUGHTER’S GYMNASTICS CLASS                      WHILE CONGRESS DEBATES AR-15s                                    By Andrew Hidas Everything to live for, the everything stretched out before them, gamboling like lambs let loose to bound and bound in the tall grasses of spring. Parents on their phones up above, a half-eye at most diverted from Facebook, the glowing faces of their daughters lost in the jumble of limbs below. “He shot my friend that was next to me and…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #29: K.C. Douglas’s “Mercury Boogie”

    June 5, 2022 - By 

    The light & the dark, the transcendent & tragic, the hopeful & hopeless—it’s all mixed and jumbled up, both gladdening and tormenting us in alternate takes, asking us to swallow it whole as the price of our humanity. Surely, the dark forces that seem all around us at the moment are real enough, and they want nothing more than to have us surrender to their come-hither, sucking sound of despair. They tempt us, the ultimate menacing seductress, to give in, give up, lose faith in the notion that goodness and beauty and even lightness of heart can persist, can still…