How I hate modern motor roads. Come let me count the ways. First there is the intimate shame of personal inadequateness. I know my reactions while driving are not swift enough to be safe at fifty-five miles per hour—in fact, they are unsafe at any speed, as my family says. All too often I will … Read more
One of those basic-cable lifestyle programs recently ran an episode on a hotel/spa that caters to the dogs of celebrities. Andy Warhol would have loved it. Classical music gets piped into a sleeping chamber lined with rows of plush dog beds. Guests drink from personalized Baccarat crystal water dishes and dine on cubed beef filets … Read more
In springtime, every man’s fancy turns to love–and, in my case, to commencement speeches. I love reading them, listening to them, critiquing them, even the bad ones. I dream of marching with colleagues through a cheering thong of graduates, resplendent in flowing robes, and delivering a simple yet powerful address that brings the youthful crowd … Read more
Watching people in museums is often as absorbing as studying the displays. Some years ago, my old tutor was standing under the great sixth-century dome of the Holy Wisdom in Istanbul, lecturing to a rather tweedy group of English country gentry. His audience was starting to suffer from museum leg, when a pigeon detached itself … Read more
Hi! I’m Colleen Kruse. I’m that pal of yours who is the proud owner of the Richard Caruso Molecular Hairsetter, the Miracle Blade/Ginsu Knife Garnish Set, the Euro Broom, the Magic Bullet, the Vitamix. Let’s not forget the Kitchen Plus 2000, either. These products are the fruits of hours spent watching late-night infomercials. I was … Read more
Seventeen years ago, I received a degree from the University of Michigan Law School, one of America’s top schools. My Harvard undergraduate degree opened doors at Michigan, and both of those degrees have opened other doors ever since–a fact that I have always appreciated. I have since learned that it’s our humanity, not paper credentials, … Read more
I have a colleague at the University of Minnesota who hates commencement. Marching in gowns and hoods to the boom of Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance” puts her in mind, she says, of the army. I hardly like to point out that most faculty marching would have its practitioners instantaneously in the guardroom were it ever … Read more
There’s a story in the good book, about a cup that is clean on the outside and dirty on the inside. The cup is golden, pretty to look at, and almost certainly the first one that you would take off the shelf. But you wouldn’t want to drink from it, because you’d probably get sick. … Read more
This November, Minneapolis’s only African-American City Council members, Natalie Johnson Lee and Don Samuels, will go head to head for the same council seat. Redistricting has yanked Samuels’s troubled Jordan neighborhood out of the Third Ward, the old “Nordeast,” and fused it with the Fifth Ward. The Fifth Ward, meanwhile, lost the Warehouse District and … Read more
Home is where we start from. That’s why different things appear perfectly natural to different folk. For much of the Near East it is not democracy that is natural but the milet system of the old Ottoman Empire, where no one had votes, but each minority was responsible for itself under an Islamic umbrella. For … Read more