by Barry Goldman

The iconic Aretha Franklin performance of (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman came across my feed the other day. You can watch it here. The occasion was the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors celebrating Carole King. The video went viral right away, and it has resurfaced and gone viral again periodically ever since. You can see Carole King with her heart nearly bursting out of her chest. You can see Michelle and Barack Obama singing along. About one minute in, Obama wipes a tear from his eye. At 3:12 Aretha drops the mink – a classic gospel move – and brings the audience to its feet. Aretha’s voice soars and the audience roars. It’s glorious.

David Remnick wrote about the performance in The New Yorker a few weeks later. He said:

Watch it if you haven’t: in under five minutes, your life will improve by a minimum of forty-seven per cent.

I’ve watched the clip at least 10 times while writing this piece and I tear up every time. It is a case of what Rachel Feintzeig calls “collective effervescence.”

When you’re surrounded by people experiencing the exact same emotion as you… the feeling multiplies, refracts, comes back to you heightened. Increasingly, I believe this is what makes life worth living.

Dave Barry says, “Aretha Franklin is — I will fight you on this — the greatest female singer of all time.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Thomas R. Wells

European colonisation is a hot topic these days, among my academic colleagues and students, and the people who like to spread moral indignation on the internet. This surge in concern over the evils of colonisation is somewhat surprising. Thirty years or so ago when I first acquired a political awareness there was much less interest in colonisation, and a much more pros and cons format to its discussion. In the normal course of things, events recede in significance as time goes by and other events become more relevant to explaining where we are and why. So why is colonisation getting bigger as it gets further away?

The clue is in the moral indignation and the rise in recent decades of the politics of pity. Pity – feeling sorry for those worse off than ourselves – has become a dominant schema for understanding ourselves, society, and morality. It successfully displaces more egalitarian modes of empathy (‘compassion’) because every act of pity contains within it the gratifying confirmation of our own superiority. The politics of pity turns around identifying who gets to be counted as a victim, and thus free from blame as well as moral agency, and who the bad guys are who should be made to pay. The fixation on colonialism appears a classic case, supplying a psychically satisfying hierarchical division of the world into victims (poor countries whose only role is to suffer injustices) and perpetrators (rich countries with the status of moral actors, capable of initiating good and bad actions).

This is troubling in various ways. First, it excises the moral agency of political actors in poor countries. When a poor country government does wrong – tortures journalists, steals elections, embezzles oil revenues – moral judgement of their choices is considered inappropriate. Instead a causal explanation is sought for such regrettable events. What could have made those governments do such a terrible thing? With enough imagination, an explanation can always be found in the extended consequences of historic colonialism. The people in those countries who think their own governments do deserve moral criticism go largely unheard.

Second, in this zero-sum moral relationship, all moral agency is transferred to the rich ‘coloniser’ countries. Read more »

by Derek Neal

The other day I heard that Harvard had closed its Writing Center. This saddened me, as I had once been a university writing tutor myself—not at Harvard, but at my local college, the University of Vermont. Reading the news, I thought I might cast my mind back, 14 years ago, to when I first became a tutor. I haven’t thought about that time in many years, and the only way for me to recover it, to turn over those stones in my memory, see the activity underneath, is to write. I really was that person, and that person is still inside me somewhere, but unless I write, that self lies dormant, replaced by my present self.

Fall semester, 2012. Red brick buildings, autumn leaves, crossing the quad, running into friends constantly, lying on a picnic blanket in the grass, jumping on a slackline. Possibility everywhere. Every free moment, reading and writing, weekends spent wandering into one building on campus, working for two hours on an essay, then moving to a new spot, more writing, again and again, until something had been formed, somehow, by turning ideas over and over, a coherence and a sense had been fashioned from a jumble of thought, something created that hadn’t existed before, and that could only be created through the process of writing.

My first session: an exchange student from Sweden with bright blonde hair. That’s all I remember. She was older than me, and at that age, even one year makes a difference. Surely I was nervous, and probably shy, too. I must have followed what we’d learned in class—find out where the student is in the writing process, have them read their paper out loud, be sure to understand the assignment, don’t correct grammar, diagnose global issues or specific, narrow problems, ask questions, make it a conversation, a dialogue. At the end of the session, she was grateful. I still remember that; she recognized the effort I’d put in, and because of her recognition, I realized I’d done well. She was leaving the 50-minute session with more clarity than when she’d walked into the Writing Center.

There were other students. Read more »

Bhen Alan. Three Hundred Thirty Three, 2022.

Woven rice sack and canvas, fans, coconut leaves, abaca, sinamay, bamboo leaves, feathers, found yarn, found thread, fabrics, palaspas, rattan, and industrial plastic fence on stretcher bar.

…“When I moved to Canada, I didn’t eat Filipino food for a very long time, I didn’t speak the language, and I literally forgot Filipino gestures and movements,” he says. “I just wanted to fit in.”

Alan’s conundrum was not unique. Immigrants across the globe feel pressure to assimilate, but there is a particular Filipino phenomenon of self-erasure, he says, referred to in Tagalog as tago ng tago (TNT), representing the physical, psychological, and spiritual evasions that undocumented overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) must live with to survive. …

“Tago ng tago means ‘always hiding’—it [refers] to Filipino immigrants working abroad who chose to stay to make more money to support their families in spite of not being authorized,” Alan says. “It’s about hiding your identity from adversity, but also cementing yourself in a space that you cannot be removed from, in order for you to support your family and yourself.”

More here and here.

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

Sometimes it’s brave to lose control. We feel powerful when we can easily define, divide, and sort. We know what to do when we observe recognizable patterns and categories. It’s comfortable to have answers and the sooner the better. Contemporary technology brings ready solutions to problems we had yet to identify; we needn’t spend a moment in uncertainty. There is no need to pay careful attention. So much the worse for us, argue some philosophers. Attention is communion.

The philosopher Simone Weil was fond of encouraging the practice of attention in her students. She advised them to sit quietly and pay attention to the problems of geometry. In doing so, she was not asking them to seek answers—she wanted them to be attentive to the problems themselves. This involves an opening of oneself; a willingness to sit with the problems and take them in. In Reflection on the Right Use of School Studies with an Eye Toward the Love of God, Weil observed that,

Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one’s pupils: “Now you must pay attention,” one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have been concentrating on nothing. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles.

Real attention, for Weil, involves letting oneself go and becoming receptive. When we are told to focus, we often retreat further into ourselves. We’re inclined to think of focus as a kind of reflective introspection. When we introspect, we seek. When we pay attention, if we are lucky, we perceive. “Attention,” Weil says, “consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.” When we are attentive, we are vessels waiting to be filled. There is a subtle humility in this way of viewing the world. Because attention requires receptiveness in this way, we can be surprisingly resistant to it. Weil says, aptly, “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue.” Perhaps we are afraid that receptiveness means vulnerability. We’re worried that vulnerability can lead to pain, exploitation, and rejection. Read more »

by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

In Ted Chiang’s “Hell Is the Absence of God,” the term “restoration” appears multiple times in relation to the legs of one of the characters, Janice Reilly. The story, first published in 2001 and winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, was collected in Stories of Your Life and Others (2002). It unfolds in a world governed by theological literalism, a fictive order wherein, as Chiang writes of Hell, “the truth of this was plain for anyone to see”: the existence of God is not a matter of belief but empirical record, angels manifest as public events, and Heaven and Hell are real.

Janice was born without legs, the result of a visitation by the angel Bardiel when her mother was eight months pregnant. She has, over the course of her life, constructed from that fact a complete identity and vocation. “Without pride or defiance,” Chiang writes, “she saw it as her responsibility to show others that her condition did not indicate weakness, but rather strength.” She becomes a writer, a public speaker, the founder of a non-profit organisation, and an influential figure within disabled communities.

All is well until the unexpected visitation of another angel, Rashiel, which precipitates a crisis. Chiang has written that the story only came together once he imagined angels as terrifyingly powerful forces whose visitations resemble natural disasters,[1] and Rashiel arrives as an earthquake: Janice is letting herself into her house “when the tremors began.” His name echoes Ra’ashiel, the angel set over the earthquake in the Hebrew Book of Enoch.[2] Repair, in other words, comes to Janice with the force and indifference of a natural disaster. We are told that Janice catches “a glimpse of silver in the sky” before losing consciousness during Rashiel’s appearance. When she wakes up, she encounters “the biggest surprise of her life: the sight of her two new legs, long, muscular, and fully functional.” She stands for the first time and is “taller than she expected,” the unfamiliar altitude inducing a vertiginous disorientation. The change is total and instantaneous—and for Janice, a catastrophe. The story’s other words for it are blessing, gift and miracle; the word Chiang returns to, again and again, is “restoration.” Read more »

“That I might arrive like Columbus, who came by wrong
to the right unknown” —Rodney Jones, poet

Coming by Wrong To The Right Unknown

It doesn’t matter where we start,
we always end where we’d not begun
being hamstrung by what we never knew
along the way to what’s to come.

When we get there, we presume,
our little-known worlds are left behind,
at least it’s what the mystics say,
they recommend we seek to find;
but their promises are so obscure
you never know to where they surge—
the way, the truth, the light
sometimes seem a demiurge,
a minor cloud of hints and signs,
a myth, a mist of pointless lines

—except, in unknown’s push and shove,
the brilliant flames of
laugh and love!

Jim Culleny, 2/2/21

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by Akim Reinhardt

There have always been assholes, and there will always be. It’s unavoidable. Putting up with assholes, and even being an asshole once in a while, are both part of the human condition. Occasionally wanting to be an asshole is normal, and most everyone is an asshole sometimes.

Sometimes.

Not being an asshole too often or too deeply is a sign of maturity. But some adults are chronically immature, so societies inevitably design ways to limit the frequency and depth of asshole behavior. They try to keep their members in line by defining acceptable behavior, creating guardrails to discourage people from transgressing, and shaming, censuring, or even punishing assholes who go too far.

But what happens when one or more assholes become very influential? What happens when assholes come to dominate a small group of family or friends, or a larger institution such as a business or a house of worship.

Or even a whole nation.

When the assholes move into positions of power and influence, they will do real damage. Such is the way of assholes. But over time, something perhaps more alarming will also happen: all the other assholes will get too comfortable with their assholery. As the old guardrails become dented and battered, asshole behavior will become normalized, the assholes will be emboldened, and then all bets are off. That’s how a few well-positioned assholes can screw everything up for everybody.

In a society where assholes are denied much influence and power, it’s possible to rein in asshole behavior, at least to a degree. But when assholes are in charge or set the tone, social controls break down, asshole behavior becomes publicly normalized, and all the lesser assholes soon feel free to really indulge.

I was reminded of this last month at the Maryland State Fair. An older black woman, perhaps in her late sixties or early seventies, was pushing a baby in a modest stroller along the walkway by the food vendors. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

“You might have Dengue,” the nice Thai doctor who spoke excellent English with a twang from his days at University of Tennessee told me, “Or you might have Weil’s Disease. We’ll need to take you for bloodwork to know which it is.”

“What will the difference be if I have Dengue versus Weil’s Disease?” my clammy, sweaty self asked.

“Well, none really. They have the same symptoms, and we treat it the same way – you go home, take Paracetamol (Tylenol in Asia), drink lots of fluids and wait it out. We just need to know for public health records and follow-up.”

In Bangkok – and across Thailand – Dengue wasn’t and isn’t uncommon. Only, unlike Leptospirosis  – the mild form of communicable, bacteria-caused Weil’s Disease I had – addressing the mosquito population can control its spread. Of course, in Thailand, this is more theory than reality as anyone can tell you – mosquitoes and their bites are just a part of life.

Not so in Singapore.

I began visiting Singapore for business two years after leaving Thailand and residing there for a two-year stint about nine months after that. There was so much about Singapore that struck me in those early days starting with the obvious things like the culture, technology, development, cleanliness, order…. However, we don’t always register the absence of problems or annoyances, especially when they’re small – like mosquitoes.

I never got mosquito bites in Singapore. Ever. Read more »

by Philip Graham

While Mary Cappello’s Frost Will Come may seem, at first glance, to be about the stages of death (specifically, the death of her mother Rosemary Cappello, whose “soul was gloriously Rubenesque”), it is also a book that is vibrantly about life; about caring and obligation; about love’s varied and complicated revelations; and about what has been given to a daughter who, now grown, honors those gifts with fierce commitment and compassion.

Rosemary Cappello was by all accounts an extraordinary person, someone who found a way, throughout the challenges of her long life, to both “mother and make art,” and she combined in daily life her interests in nature and culture, solitude and sociality, and film, music, and literature. Rosemary played classical music on the piano, she painted, she wrote and published poetry (I am an admirer of her poetry collection Wonderful Disaster), and she was a central figure of a literary community in Philadelphia.

But the initial portrait of Rosemary Cappello that is most striking in Frost Will Come is that of an almost confoundingly heroic woman, clinging through sheer will to her love of life through every remaining moment.

(Note: Captions for images will appear at the end of this conversation.)

PHILIP GRAHAM: Frost Will Come is a book of such richness that I’ve hesitated how to pick a beginning for our discussion. But here goes!

On the surface, your book’s primary locus might seem to be the bardo of your mother Rosemary’s transition from life to death. But it seems to me that you also recount another bardo, one that unfolds in a different direction: from death to life. As you grapple with your mother’s passing—its own kind of odyssey— you address her still powerful presence: “I have to write this, Mom, because I can’t remember who I was before this happened or imagine who I might continue to become.”

So, a book simultaneously and almost dizzyingly alert to the intricate links between life and death.

MARY CAPPELLO: What an incredibly beautiful précis of the directions in which my book moves, Philip! Thank you for that marvelous insight.

One of the early centers of Frost Will Come focuses on re-finding myself in my mother’s library when my partner Jean and I were camped out in her one-bedroom apartment in the last months of my mom’s life and rediscovering those books that had shaped me, too, but suddenly being made privy to her marginalia. Read more »

by Jonas Gardsby

Annie Dillard is now ineligible for the Nobel Prize. The Swedish Academy won’t award it posthumously. In light of her recent passing, however, I think it is worth reflecting on the idea that she should have won the prize. While you could try to make the case solely on the merit of her style, the implications of winning the Nobel warrant something more than great talent fully realized. So, since each reader is their own judge, I offer for your consideration three reasons why Dillard deserved the prize, any one of which should have been enough. But when taken together, it’s truly apparent she was a global class talent.

She deserved the prize, first of all, as the major practitioner of literary nonfiction. The committee has historically overlooked this genre. Many other literary readers do the same. In The New York Times last year, Joseph Bernstein’s article “Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?” conflated fiction with all of literature and referred to nonfiction merely as informational. And in Sweden, where local culture incubates the committee that chooses the prize, essayist Nina Burton complained that “fictional prose is hijacking the term ‘literary arts’ and … essayists are confused with critics.” She wondered, “Have we squandered Montaigne’s legacy, and does anyone know how great it was?”

The Nobel laureates who are known for nonfiction tend not to have pursued it as art. Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill turned clever phrases but lacked artistic structures. Two exceptions are Svetlana Alexievich who ghostwrites memoir, and Annie Ernaux who writes sociological memoir. But memoir is only one part of a much larger, overlooked pie. By contrast, Dillard’s nonfiction was influenced more by the structures of the long poem than by the narrative devices of fiction. The meaning is created not through argumentation or character development but through artistic structure, the relation of parts. Thus you have Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with its bilateral paired chapters, “An Expedition to the Pole” which invented the now popular braided essay, “Total Eclipse” which tells the same story four times through different levels of consciousness, and the nonfiction collage For the Time Being. She reinvented the form each time she wrote it, carving a trail that others then followed and developed in their own ways. Essayist and editor Brian Doyle said her work “changed the direction of American writing.” And she continues to influence younger innovative writers like Ocean Vuong, who repeatedly comments on her importance to his artistic development.

The second reason she deserved the prize? Read more »

by Eli Rarey

Lately I have been drawn to trees. I moved across the country from Detroit to Los Angeles, and while I’ve been looking for a new apartment I have been noticing the trees nearby. If I can’t find a big tree in the neighborhood that I can hang out with, then the apartment isn’t for me.

Many trees, especially fruit trees, have lifespans comparable to a person. I’m almost 50 years old, and many of the trees planted as landscaping on city sidewalks are actually younger than I am. But when I find a tree that looks like it might be older than me, trees that might be a hundred years old or more, that’s when I get excited. I go up to the tree and press against the bark with the palm of my hand or even press my cheek up against it. I feel an intimacy here, as if the tree and I are communing in some shared language humming at the level of our skin.

I have been feeling rootless lately. I spent most of 2026 without a fixed address or a job, and now that I started a new job and I’m moving into a new place, I have the sense that I need a kind of sanctuary. Trees provide that for me—they provide comfort to someone who has felt uprooted in the world. At one point I thought maybe I had some wisdom to learn from trees about being fixed in place or even about photosynthesis—but this isn’t what I really want trees to teach me. The tree is not a role model or a science experiment. The tree is a being, like me, but a being with a radically different experience of its time on this planet. That’s what I’m reaching for, I want the tree to offer me a different sense of time. Tree time.

On September 29, a group of interfaith leaders and community activists began a eight-day pilgrimage. Their walk began at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, and continued for 96.5 miles, ending in Downtown LA at the Metropolitan Detention Center. This group explicitly uses the word “pilgrimage” to describe this action. They are coming together as spiritual communities and social activists; they do not separate those spheres. On the contrary, these feed each other. Justice is a constant topic of religious texts—both divine justice and the justice or injustice among humans. Demanding justice is a moral requirement. Rabbis, pastors, and ministers all walked together. All of their faiths are deeply concerned with justice and all include long-practiced, ancient traditions of pilgrimage. Read more »

Apple orchards in Vahrn, South Tyrol, with apples ready for harvest. Those are undeployed hail nets (hail can destroy the crop) and the tractor in the background is one of the ones that will tow these apples (once they are picked and put into crates) to a central location from where they are shipped all over the world (someone sent me a photo of an apple being sold in a market in Islamabad with a sticker identifying it as having been grown in South Tyrol). While having 0.125% of the population of Europe, South Tyrol grows about 10% of its apples.

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by Charles Siegel

A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to the SiriusXM “Real Jazz” channel while driving. I had just pulled in to a grocery store parking lot, and was about to get out of the car, when the program host mentioned that they were celebrating John Coltrane’s 100th birthday, which was to occur on September 23rd. Then she played Coltrane’s version of “Lush Life,” which he recorded with singer Johnny Hartman, and I was transported, as I am every time I hear this recording. Even in a grocery store parking lot.

There isn’t anything I could possibly add to the many appraisals written for Coltrane’s centennial. Here are two good quotes I happened to catch: Ingrid Monson, a professor of African-American music at Harvard, said, “I would put it simply: There has never been a jazz artist more profound than John Coltrane, and that’s saying a lot.” And another saxophonist, Immanuel Wilkins, put it this way: Coltrane “shows you that more work actually gets us closer to the divine. He’s the North Star, for sure.”

As I said, I can’t add anything to the discourse about Coltrane’s legacy. I did write, a year ago, about the 65th anniversary of the Coltrane quartet’s recording of “My Favorite Things.”  “Lush Life” is a different kind of experience, but just as sublime.

The song was written by Billy Strayhorn in the mid-1930s. Strayhorn is best known for his long collaboration with Duke Ellington; he wrote “Take the A-Train,” Ellington’s signature tune, and arranged or wrote music and lyrics for many other of his most well-known songs, such as “Satin Doll,” “Sophisticated Lady” and “Mood Indigo.” “Lush Life,” however, was written before Strayhorn began working with Ellington. In Ted Gioia’s excellent “The History of Jazz,” he writes that “Lush Life” was “the piece that caught Ellington’s attention” the night Strayhorn met Ellington when he played in Strayhorn’s hometown of Pittsburgh in 1938. After the show, Strayhorn played a few songs for Ellington.

“Lush Life” is like a jewel with many facets. But not a diamond — it’s something darker, like a ruby or a sapphire. Read more »

by Brooks Riley