June 22, 2017
Minor League Season Begins—Again
People asked Ron Shelton, again and again, if he was going to write a sequel to Bull Durham. He couldn’t bring himself to do it, and I’m glad he didn’t. […]
January 13, 2017
Goodbye, Marcus Aurelius
Blaming Russia for the outcome of our recent election is, among other things, a way of offloading collective guilt for its result. The same goes for blaming the electoral […]
November 4, 2015
The Principle of Inversion
If you look from a distance at our media talking about traditional religions, you find that “Hinduism” is reduced to the caste system and Hindu nationalism, “Islam” to fundamentalist or […]
October 25, 2015
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Irrelevance
With the American government sending drones overseas, with our military involved over the past decade in conflict after dirty conflict; with the largest incarcerated population in the world, and […]
April 28, 2015
everywhere/everywhere/everywhere
I am in Baltimore and I have nothing to say. I have nothing to say because I am trying to listen. I am trying to listen to Ta-Nehisi Coates: Now, […]
December 11, 2014
Martyr Stories, Past and Present
Some of the most popular stories in medieval Europe were tales of saints and martyrs. Many of the hagiographies were essentially martyr stories as well, seeing as most early Christians were […]
September 5, 2014
Political Poetry
Should poets speak truth to power? Is it their role to court censorship, to call out social injustices, to commentate, to dare reveal political iniquity for what it is […]
October 8, 2013
The Endgame and the Spin
In all high-minded or “holy” group violence, you’ll see two factors at play: The Endgame and the Spin. (Which one of these two gets emphasized and reviled depends on […]
August 31, 2013
Not Guilty–Of Course
Out of the hurricane of words published in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, I found Robin D.G. Kelley’s essay, “The U.S. v. Trayvon Martin: How the System Worked,” to […]
June 4, 2013
Food For Thought, Force-Fed
What is interesting about the force-feeding of inmates at Guantanamo is, first of all, that you have a bunch of supposedly radical, violent Islamists espousing a protest technique, the stubbornly […]
March 25, 2013
Why I Don’t Teach Poetry Writing
What are we teaching when we teach the writing of poetry? Much of what we call the “teaching” of poetry is actually the teaching of contemporary conventions governing poetry. […]
March 7, 2013
A Note on Sentimentality
One of the underdiscussed aspects of literary taste is the principle of exclusion: Not what is welcomed in a work, but what is disallowed. In the world of contemporary fiction, […]