And why that’s somehow even more offensive than Trump himself — Occasionally, out of some vestigial reflex, I still go through the archaic motions of being a citizen in a functioning republic. I wrote to my congressman last week. My representative, Andy Harris, is not what you’d call a major player in the D.C. arena; he’s a low-level Republican tool who…

How experiences become memories, which turn into stories — My friend Lisa and I have a very specific, limited relationship: We make mix CDs (and more recently, playlists) of soundtrack music for each other. Yet it’s also oddly intimate: a shared love of music bares something in you — especially love of an uncool, schmaltzy genre like movie scores…

And it has, repeatedly, only to be revolutionized and rebuilt. What kind of country will we create now? — Institutions, like individuals, never change because they realize they ought to; they only ever change because they’re forced to, by crisis, catastrophe. No one goes to their first AA meeting because they recognize that they have a drinking problem and it’s going to get out of hand unless they do…

The world may be on pause, but your life isn’t (and other thoughts for the class of coronavirus) — For Sophia. There’s a young writer I correspond with who was to have graduated college this month. She’d planned to move to New York City this summer, where she hoped she would finally meet the kinds of people she wanted to talk with about literature, art, and ideas. I’d put…

Isolation has made me realize how vital human connections are — This month I was to have celebrated an occasion I’ve been looking forward to for 25 years: a return trip to the city of Rethymnou, on the island of Crete, where, in April of 1995, I was stabbed in the throat. A dozen of my best friends had agreed to…

Television was supposed to be the ultimate idiot box. Then came the internet. — Sometime in the 1990s, most of my friends and I got rid of our TVs. This was how you could tell who the interesting, literate people were. If you went to a party where people were talking about whatever was on last night, you knew to make an excuse to…

Most of the time, listening is enough — I have received more advice over the last six months, both solicited and un-, than I’ve ever heard before in my life. I was facing a major life decision — I hesitate to tell you what the specific decision concerned, because if I do, you, too, will immediately form your…

To be alive is to solve problems — both real and imagined — Lately one of my favorite leisure activities is to lie awake for several hours worrying about everything that is wrong with my life, which, currently, is almost everything. I like to set aside some time each day for this pastime — from, say, midnight ’til two or three in the…

There’s so much to enrage a sane person — not just in the headlines, but in the everyday fabric of our lives — The last couple of days I’ve been filled with rage. Nothing pathological or out of the ordinary — just some minor spikes in the normal baseline of everyday male rage. The triggering incidents were relatively trivial: a couple of man-boys wouldn’t shut up on Amtrak’s Quiet Car (these days an…