Fire, brimstone and impending apocalypse have always had great success in the pulpit, and the apocalypse is always easier to imagine than the strange circuitous routes to what actually comes next.
Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into it and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route of becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses...
Everyone has stories of the small coincidence by which their parents met or their grandmother was saved from fire or their grandfather from the grenade, of the choice made by the most whimsical means...
De Certeau’s metaphor suggests a frightening possibility: that if the city is a language spoken by walkers, then a postpedestrian city not only has fallen silent but risks becoming a dead language, on...
Children, Landon said, are good at getting lost, because the key in survival is knowing you're lost: they don't stray far, they curl up in some sheltered place at night, they know they need help.
Can one understand the presence of English literature without the absences of Irish literature? Are the presences in the former, at some level, bites taken out of the latter? Is England gardenlike bec...
And the conservatives have not mounted what seems to be their real objection: that they wish to preserve traditional marriage and more than that, traditional gender roles. I know lovely and amazing he...
A labyrinth is an ancient device that compresses a journey into a small space, winds up a path like thread on a spool. It contains beginning, confusion, perseverance, arrival, and return. There at las...
A comprehensive utopia may be out of reach, but the effort to realise it shapes the world for the better all the same. The belief may not be true, but it is useful. Belief makes the world.
A Freudian would claim to know what they have and I lack, but intelligence is not situated in the crotch—
Not till we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lies,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. N...
Another way to put it: the more than 11,766 corpses from domestic-violence homicides between 9/11 and 2012 exceed the number of deaths of victims on that day and all American soldiers killed in the wa...
The effects of your actions may unfold in ways you cannot foresee or even imagine. They may unfold long after your death. That is when the words of so many writers resonate most.
Some men explained why men explaining things to women wasn't really a gendered phenomenon. Usually, women pointed out that, in insisting on their right to dismiss the experiences women say they have,...
Other eras and cultures often asked different questions from the ones we ask now: What is the most meaningful thing you can do with your life? What’s your contribution to the world or your community?...
One merely had to imagine a woman candidate doing what Trump did, from lying to leering, to understand what latitude masculinity possesses. No advanced step take by women has been so bitterly conteste...
More than any other city, [Paris] has entered the paintings and the novels of those under its sway, so that representation and reality reflect each other like a pair of facing mirrors, and walking Par...
Modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
Many of the great humanitarian and environmental campaigns of our time have been to make the unknown real, the invisible visible, to bring the faraway near, so that the suffering of sweatshop workers,...
It’s the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to preconception, to go into the dark with their eyes open.