“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” —Zora Neale Hurston This quote has been on my mind recently. It is in the epigraph of a recent read: Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In the Dream House, a title which also appeared in the acknowledgments of the book at […]
Tag: book reviews
Posted inArts & Culture
The “singing mailman” with a unique gift
To write about John Prine, whose death from COVID-19 related complications in April 2020 devastated fans around the world, is an inherently intimate act. Prine’s music has always felt like a treasured good, sacred and familial. I felt that as a kid, hearing stories from my dad, who lived near Chicago in the 1970s and […]
Posted inNews & Politics
The missing link in the War on Poverty
To better help the urban poor, government must address not just their deprivation but also their segregation.
Posted inColumns & Opinion
The undoing of a president’s mystique
What would have happened to JFK if he’d been scrutinized in the same way as Obama?
Posted inBlogs
Homer Simpson, Don Draper, and other sociopaths
Adam Kotsko discusses Why We Love Sociopaths: A Guide to Late Capitalist Television, his book on contemporary television
Posted inBlogs
So many books, so little time
Do we need another book review? Or just a better way to find good books?
Posted inNews & Politics
Trial by Goudie, Part 2/Staples and Bellow, an Odd Couple/News Speak/The Bosnia Question
Trial by Goudie, Part 2 A suspect arrested for a sensational crime is innocent in the eyes of the law, guilty in the eyes of the state, and copy in the eyes of the media. You might expect this copy to be written with measured care. What we often get instead is the reporter in […]