A man spends ten years trying to sail home to his faithful wife… A naked foot slides, with mysterious ease, into the prince’s slipper… A girl stands on a balcony, […]
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Dan Fagin’s new book “Toms River, A Story of Science and Salvation”, about a classic type of environmental story back in the 80s and 90s, the ‘cancer cluster’, is a […]
Kate Losse reviewed Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In unfavorably in Dissent. For this reason, her publicist tweeted that Losse is going to “a special place in hell,” reserved for women who […]
The human mind likes simplicity. It’s a complicated world, so we filter it into one cohesive and easy-to-digest worldview. This perspective is a rather unscientific one, however. When we observe […]
The Brooklyn Book Festival took place last weekend, and I still can’t stop thinking about Mary Higgins Clark. She’s a GILF, a grandmother I’d like to “Friend,” and leave inside […]
As some more traditionalist and religious conservatives have noted with disgust, that’s the advice of Ayn Rand: The best aspect of Christmas is the aspect usually decried by the mystics: […]
Five hundred years ago today, Michelangelo unveiled The Sistine Chapel Ceiling to Pope Julius II. The next day, All Saints’ Day 1512, the Pope inaugurated the newly decorated chapel with […]
Upon seeing in person Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, American novelist Henry James pithily dubbed it “the saddest work of art in the world.” War, weather, da Vinci’s own […]
What’s your Halloween ideal: Alfred Hitchcock or Wes Craven? If you pick the Master of Suspense over Nightmare on Elm Street, then I have the ultimate Halloween artist for you: […]
According to The Independent, a recent Yale-Moscow State University study has found “a modest but statistically significant familiality and heritability element to creative writing.” The conclusion was based on an evaluation […]
Some research proposes that sorrow in fiction might be a form of psychological relief. A more fruitful explanation is that important virtues, values and morals that elicit uplifting emotions accompany sad moments in fiction.
Among the baker’s dozen of legends obscuring the true origin of the croissant, the one repeated most often transports us back to Austria in 1683. Up before dawn, Vienna’s bakers […]
The same mindset that drives a person to have it all eventually stops them from having what they really want.
What’s the Big Idea? My brother-in-law, a tenured professor at Osgood law school in Toronto, sent me an article yesterday. “This will interest you. Anne-Marie is a rockstar academic!” The […]
The new Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayeris pregnant, and not planning on taking maternity leave. This has stirred renewed conversation about “having it all,” and women’s lives. I’ve written before in […]
Unwrapping the paintings for our “Abstraction” exhibition, I had a shock or at least a wonderful surprise. I called to my associates and said, “Wow, who of you managed to […]
Longtime readers of this blog may remember that I wrote a book some time ago. What happened to it is something I’ve only alluded to a few times. Suffice to […]
Before reading please click ‘View Entire Story’. My apologies for the length. Over at the New Statesman, Mehdi Hasan wrote an article against abortion. It’s not entirely clear whether Hasan […]
Author and Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown died yesterday at the lovely age of 90, after having been declared a “living landmark” in New York. In her honor I dusted […]
“Who is it?” is often as big a question for art historians as “Who done it?” The mysterious model of many a famous painting—perhaps none so mysterious as the Girl […]
Glenn Reynolds, one of America’s leading bloggers at Instapundit, has written a very short and accessible book called The Higher Education Bubble. My review amounts to this: It has all […]
In the midst of an intense meditation on Walt Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence suddenly proclaims: The essential function of art is moral. Not […]
Anne-Marie Slaughter’s new piece in The Atlantic about how women cannot “have it all” has provoked a wave of commentary, but none that I have seen has mentioned the article’s […]
What’s the Big Idea? Happy International Women’s Day! This is the first of many events throughout the month which focus on celebrating the historic achievements of women around the world, […]
It was as though a spontaneous performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream broke out next to us on the sidewalk. My husband and I were on our way home […]
There are some times when it gives me little pleasure to be right, and this is one of them: The Vatican has launched a crackdown on the umbrella group that […]
Summary: The Roman Catholic equivalent of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “Infidel”. A luminous, extraordinary account of one woman who devoted her life to Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, saw the organization […]
Last month, I posted my review of “An Unquenchable Thirst”, Mary Johnson’s luminous and enlightening memoir about the twenty years she spent as one of Mother Teresa’s nuns. After writing […]
Editorial Note: This is a guest contribution from KristenWolf, author of The Way, which was was recently selected by Oprah for her Reading List. Everyone grows up under the shadow of religion. No matter your […]
In my essay “Into the Clear Air“, I wrote about how people leaving religion often go through a stage of profound darkness. In the end stages of deconversion, there’s acceptance […]