Even a magnificent city such as Florence becomes more intriguing if there is a demon at work in the alleys.
And just as there is random horror-murder,suicide,child abuse,car accidents.......there is also indiscriminate kindness.Not merely miracles,though I have experienced them.But simple human connection,e...
A moment later, all of the men at the party, stupefied by the way the hooker had gone banshee,
Are an Armenian, says the Turk with the handgun. I am. Where are you going? Damascus. Why? My sister lives there. What do you do? I’m an engineer. I’m working on the Baghdad Railway—the spur from Alep...
You know the type—will give herself to the first nobleman in a uniform who comes calling with a couple of eggs and a piece of rat meat.You’re selling yourself short.I’ve just sold myself for rat meat,...
Too often we presume that the unexpected strangers in our lives bode ill,or we are skeptical of their designs.We think we know more.And while I am well aware that there is indeed all manner of malevol...
Those who participate in a genocide as well as those who merely look away rarely volunteer much in the way of anecdote or observation. Same with the heroic and the righteous. Usually it's only the sur...
She did it because it was, like so much else that made her happy, dangerous and self-destructive and just a little bit sick.
No surgery in the world was going to offer him the particular history that went along with growing up female. No procedure was going to give him the joys or the terrors that must accompany pregnancy-...
In her experience, dead children, unlike dead adults, always looked as if they were sleeping - though she understood that there was an element of wishful thinking whenever she had come across corpses...
Elena believed that reportage like that might be compelling and beautiful, but it would never gain traction in the Age of the Troll. In the Age of Mass Shootings. In the Age of the Suicide Bomb in the...
If you were Bill Clinton, how did you justify Monica Lewinsky to Chelsea? What did you say about the cigar and the beret and the little blue dress? If you were Anthony Weiner, how in the world did you...
Did you know that a lot of Emily Dickinson’s poems can be sung to the theme from Gilligan’s Island? Not kidding, this is totally legit.
But she insists the family hadn’t a choice. Not true. We always have choices. Isn’t that what Dante teaches us?I really have become quite the Dante scholar: There is no greater sorrow than to recall o...
As Jeremy Bentham had asked about animals well over two hundred years ago, the question was not whether they could reason or talk, but could they suffer? And yet, somehow, it seemed to take more imagi...
And so Cristina submerged her ears beneath the water and the world grew a little quieter; her hair fanned out atop the plane and she ran her fingers through it and was reminded of a goddess in a Renai...
My mother used to talk about passages and, once in a while, about ordeals. We all have them; we are all shaped by them. She thought the key was to find the healing in the hurt.
If they veered left, it would feel to them as if they were sinking into the earth: the path would narrow as the ground around them rose up to their hips, then shoulders, then heads. The walls would tu...
Boys look at us like we look at horses: color, height, eyes. tail. They can't help but have preferences.