• Fiction - History

    On Standing Tall: Claire Keegan’s
    “Small Things Like These”

    January 31, 2025 - By 

    “So many things had a way of looking finer, when they were not so close,” muses coal merchant Bill Furlong, the protagonist in Claire Keegan’s finely sculpted 2021 novella, “Small Things Like These.” Furlong had been admiring the river that passes through his small Irish town, but upon approaching it, finds himself wondering “which he rathered: the sight of town or its reflection on the water.” (Side note right off the top: “…he rathered…” Please don’t ever listen to anyone who suggests language, “mere” words, aren’t beautiful and endlessly pliable things.) The same basic questions—distanced or closeup? gauzy appearance or…

  • General Nonfiction - Politics/Culture

    A Manifesto for Justice: “Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth”

    January 26, 2025 - By 

    In these not-much-United States, we live, by any statistical measure one applies, in a new Gilded Age. Not since the age of the robber barons and the current president’s favorite predecessor, William McKinley, has the gap been so yawning between the upper and lower wealth strata of our society, not to mention the gap between the developed and undeveloped economies around the world. The data are most everywhere one cares to look, a bare fraction of which we will touch on in this post. The common fact binding them together is that the rich keep getting richer at an accelerating…

  • Music

    Brilliant Songs #52:
    David Mallett’s “Celebration”

    January 18, 2025 - By 

    All right, so we will let pass without further comment the strange coincidence of the holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.—and all the noble ideals he stood and died for—falling this year on the same day as the inauguration of the incoming president. We shall instead focus on another profoundly decent man who also called us to our better angels over a long career of music-making. I, perhaps like you, have sung David Mallett’s music out loud on various occasions over many years now without even knowing who he was. His “Garden Song” (“Inch by inch, row by row….”) has…

  • Politics/Culture - Religion

    Will Jimmy Carter’s Religion Survive Christian Dominionism and Its
    “Army of God?”

    January 11, 2025 - By 

    So many fine memories and testimonials to the spirit of former President Jimmy Carter this past week. The entire nearly three-hour service and many individual clips can be viewed on You Tube from a number of sources. For my money, a touching eulogy from his good friend and foe, former President Gerald Ford, whom Carter vanquished in the 1976 election, may have topped the list. Ford, of course, is now dead 19 years, but in a pact made between him and Carter long before, they agreed to write eulogies for each other’s funerals, with the survivor delivering the other man’s…

  • History - Politics/Culture

    The “Enemies” Within: Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”

    January 5, 2025 - By 

    “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds.” So begins the influential (and eerily prescient) 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which first appeared in “Harper’s” magazine (available here) and a year later led off historian Richard Hofstadter’s collection of the same name. In it, Hofstadter takes readers on a condensed but powerful tour (just over 16 book pages) through the landscape of an America roiling just beneath its veneer of civility and constitutional order. Irrational, extremist fears and delusions have always darkened those caverns of the nation’s psyche, most often (but not always) emanating from…