Peter Beinart went quietly into the night as the editor of The New Republic, and no one noticed except David Carr, who is of course paid to notice such things. TNR has lapsed into almost complete irrelevance, along with the putative political party it was long associated with. In fact, if it is possible to … Read more
Surely you’re aware that there are dreams all around you. You’re moving through them everywhere you go. They’re on every block and corner of the city you live in, and flickering behind the curtains and shades up and down every street. Open the Yellow Pages of your local phone book –what is that if not … Read more
In this moment my body wants to evacuate my skin, rattle its bones, and, dancing, dream itself free. Or dreaming, dance itself free. But my mind swings so wildly, and in this moment –a moment later– I feel like I am blindfolded, with a broken broomstick in my hands, flailing at a cement pinata. Meanwhile, … Read more
To be a good man. To do no harm. To see clearly. To do my laundry. To keep an open heart and mind. To acknowledge my blessings, to share them. To eat something. To give away happiness even when I have little or none to spare. To feel the pain of others. To laugh at … Read more
There was a time, not that long ago really, when a lonely and obsessive-compulsive man, unable to sleep, might have spent hours on his hands and knees, raking and grooming the floors of his apartment with his fingers, venturing into corners and hard-to-reach places to gather handfuls of hair, dust, random miniature tumbleweeds, and wispy … Read more
The King was widely regarded as a complete jackass: a foolish man who traded his Kingdom and his wondrous gifts for a chain of muffler shops. The Queen had left him immediately, and was followed in short order by his retinue (for he had, in fact, once had a retinue). A few desperate and greasy … Read more
From somewhere he heard a few hesitant notes from a piano. Perhaps it was coming from the back room, but it sounded even further away than that. It was the sound of a piano stretched to the point where it could possibly not even be a piano you were hearing. It could have … Read more
How can you not love ice dancing? I’m back after a week of visiting a tropical isle where my only form of mental exertion was figuring out how to bash tennis balls back in the general direction of their origin without having to stop sipping on my rum drinks. I couldn’t quite get it right … Read more
—Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1953 –Zellar, Basement Window, 2005 Monsieur Centrine was a fierce proponent of impossibility. That’s not to say he was one of these characters who will insist that anything is possible. Quite the contrary, in fact. Mssr. Centrine believed that life, the world, and every aspiration of the human heart represented a thoroughly … Read more
I was not much surprised to read Chris Hitchens over at Slate, defending his friend Bernard Henri Levy from Garrison Keillor’s scurillous review of American Vertigo. While Hitch wins points for style as ever –“turkey-wattled congressmen” and “the Homer of Middle America”, he shoots, he scores!–I have to say that he almost entirely missed the … Read more