Wednesday The strangest development in the Trump Ukraine scandal may be the way that Trump himself has given us the smoking gun—which is to say, the rough transcript of a phone call where he tries to shake down the Ukrainian president for dirt on the 2020 political opponent he most fears. Jon Meacham attributes Trump’s […]
Thursday I am undergoing a second cataract surgery today and so am reposting the essay I wrote following my first (successful) surgery. I don’t expect to re-experience the same mixed feelings that I described two years ago, but dramas that feature sharp objects poked into people’s eyes still seem relevant. This essay is not for […]
Tuesday My brother Sam, an enthusiastic Unitarian Universalist, gave me Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life for Christmas, and I was pleased that the author sees literature playing a major role. In today’s post I share how she draws on the ancient Greeks. Armstrong writes, “All faiths insist that compassion is the test […]
Which World Cup story do we root for? The little engine that could or redemption after humiliation?
My lectures on Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, Shakespeare and Sophocles all seem to track back to Lent these days.
An account of a dinner with an old Slovenian friend and intellectual.
A new book looks at how the ancient Greeks approached the issue of anger in works such as “Iliad,” “Ajax,” and “Hecuba.
