On Overcoming Fear-o’-Fish
The other day, while jogging on the treadmill, half-watching a sports channels that was playing on the wall television, I suddenly grew more attentive. In fact, I salivated. On screen, two jocular, laughing jumbo-sized men with easy-fit khakis and unshaven jowls were standing on a motorboat, casting into the tourmaline waters of a southern lake. One of them had just caught a firm-fleshed two-foot long bass. As he hauled it in, it leapt in the air at the end of his line, glistening green-gold, shaking off crystalline beads of water. Flashing and flipping, it showed off its…
How facts and the “superstructure” can put us all back on a positive path.
When the news of the Covid-19 epidemic emerged from China in January, alongside shocking images of the residents of Wuhan (population 11 million) — I felt a sense of alarm, but not, as yet, dread. Watching footage of hazmat-suited rescue workers delivering baskets of food to quarantined apartment dwellers — who pulled the baskets into their windows on ropes, like the woman who hauls her little dog up and down in Rear Window — I mostly was struck by how surreal everything looked. The crisis felt…
Remembering the Spirit of ’76 in 2020
This 4th of July finds me at my parents’ house, in Northern Virginia, instead of in my own apartment in Manhattan’s East Village. In the first week of June, one week before New York City’s COVID-19 lockdown was to ease, my neighborhood was besieged by protests over the murder of George Floyd — an impassioned civic response to the institutionalized racism that deforms our nation; a second pandemic.
I live on a police block in New York not far from Union Square, and both ends of my street were barricaded to protect the precinct. Storefronts on the surrounding avenues were…
Remembering, on the 76th anniversary of D-Day, the power of American idealism in action, and the importance of preserving that legacy
THEY DIDN’T teach us all that much about recent American history when I was a kid in public high school, in Indiana and Oklahoma. In Indiana, I remember devoting a passionate month or so to ancient history — the Rosetta Stone and Heinrich Schliemann’s Troy — with a wonderful classics teacher who wore fire-engine red jackets and looked like Dr. Doolittle, all plump and benign. He would waddle through the classroom, and chide us in Latin, “Discipuli, discipuli, audite…
On March 29th, as I sheltered at home in the East Village, I was overcome by an impulse that made me feel silly, but which I could not resist. I wanted to reread Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, which I’d read over and over as a child. I’d loved them so much that when I was eight, my mother had sewn me a calico dress, matching sunbonnet and white apron. I wore them to third grade; I’d wanted to be Laura. I reread those books hundreds of times in Indiana in the 1970s while reading all the other books…
An East Village test drive shows it’s pretty good at following conversations, but even better at getting them started
How vaping became the pastime of terrorists, futuristic bounty hunters, and everyone, everywhere
By Liesl Schillinger
Illustration by Keetra Dean Dixon
