Aug 4The Loneliness of the Post-Pandemic ClassroomNoah Galuten’s essay, “Food, It Turns Out, Has Little to Do with Why I Love to Travel” (2020), documents his experiences eating his way through the Southwest during the 2020 COVID lockdown. (you can read here: I Thought Eating Food Was the Best Part of Traveling. I Was Wrong. —…Education12 min read
Jun 30Literature Exists in the Margins: or, Why It Isn’t a Comic Book Without the Ads!It’s easy to forget that literature, whenever it was written, is a unique creation of its own time and space. That each book comes from somewhere, and was once singular rather than plural, meaning it began life as a recitation, a manuscript, or a first edition. Unfortunately, we tend to…Comic Books17 min read
Jun 18Do the Classics Make You Classy, or Just an Enforcer of Class?Alex Ross’ book, Listen to This (2010), is full of thought-provoking, genre-twisting conversations about music and its place in modern life. One of the most fascinating essays, “Learning the Score,” is about classical musicians bringing music to inner-city kids and the attempt to meet them half-way. …Classics8 min read
Jun 5Returning to the Tree of Tolkien’s Art: Re-Reading The Lord of the Rings Trilogy at (almost) 50Every few years, I try to read one, if not all three books of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which is the only multi-book series I feel compelled to re-read (I never make it past the third book of Dune, for example). Thanks to Peter Jackson’s films, Tolkien’s work can…Tolkien20 min read
Nov 14, 2021Frank Herbert’s Dune: Machiavelli Among the Stars“How would you like to live billions upon billions of lives?” Paul asked. “There’s a fabric of legends for you! Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they’d bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn’t it? And it puts a new shape on hate. Now can you tell what’s ruthless unless…Dune8 min read
Mar 4, 2021Marks On a Blank Surface: Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003)Almost twenty years after the initial publication of Craig Thompson’s Blankets, it remains one of the most controversial comics on the market, with numerous attempts to censor it throughout the US alone. In 2006, according to the Comic Books Legal Defense Fund’s website, a resident of Marshall, MO, filed a…Comics11 min read
Jan 29, 2021Tolstoy’s Last Gasp of Fiction: The Overlooked Masterpiece of “Hadji Murat”One of Tolstoy’s greatest stories is one of his least known, and certainly belies the more common perception of Tolstoy as a writer of triple-decker novels such as Anna Karenina and War and Peace. “Hadji Murat” is also one of his last, written at a time when he had virtually…Russian Literature10 min read
Oct 23, 2020“But Still I am the Cat”: The Uneasy Humor of Kipling’s Just So StoriesOnce an essential part of an English-speaking childhood, Kipling’s Just So Stories have fallen out of favor, replaced by the more contemporary wonders of The Hobbit and Harry Potter. Yet these stories are cut from the same cloth as his other children’s books, such as the more enduring The Jungle…Kipling8 min read
Jan 29, 2020Why Keep Western Civilization? Because It Waited So Long To Be RememberedI just read an article about universities (yet again) abandoning the Western Humanities in the face of a relentless drive to embrace diversity and a multicultural outlook. The article decried the loss of a rich culture in the face of a loose hodgepodge of approaches, none of which offers a…Western Civilization9 min read
Sep 30, 2019That Time Mary Wollstonecraft Traveled to Scandinavia Searching for a Treasure Ship (and Found a Manifesto Instead)In the Nineteenth Letter of Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, she informs her unnamed recipient, “Do not forget that in my general observations, I do not pretend to sketch a national character; but merely to note the present state of morals and manners…History9 min read
