Essays
1112 results
Page 40
On learning to talk — and listen — to each other
The muscle of translation
We learn others’ languages to remember that we are not the hubs of the universe, that different people have their own disparate experiences, their own idiosyncratic modes of expression. When you learn a second language, you glimpse your own strangeness.
Essays
5 minute read
The Sandtown-Winchester protests in Baltimore
Turning despair to hope
How would the world be different if more of us treated each other as if we were from the same species?
Essays
5 minute read
The integrity of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian
In defense of Kimye
Enough with bashing Kanye West and Kim Kardashian — they're living the American dream.
Essays
5 minute read
Mz. Fest production of ‘Shit Men Have Said to Me’
Remind me why it’s your business?
A short play in development about “how men and women communicate” predictably revolves around the quandaries of sexual harassment, but there’s a lot more to this picture.
Essays
5 minute read
Poetry in the end
Poetry isn’t a cure, and it isn’t a miracle. But there are words, phrases, whole poems that — in the grimmest, loneliest, most broken moments of my life — have offered me a tiny lozenge of light.
Essays
5 minute read
'Gett' and 'The Heidi Chronicles'
Women and choices
The choices that women are making — in work, marriage, family, and sexual identity — are both brave and definitive, as shown in today’s film and theater.
Essays
4 minute read
The Five Stages of Tax Preparation
Let's hope that identifying the Five Stages of Tax Preparation will lead to a formal recognition of this problem and a road map for sufferers everywhere.
Essays
5 minute read
On the loss of a brother
Riverside
Kile Smith, at his brother’s house, reflects on a death.
Essays
6 minute read
From the New Deal to Citizens United
Several million dollars for your thoughts
I had been calling Citizens United the worst Supreme Court decision of the past 50 years in its likely social devastation. But perhaps I was mistaken. Maybe Citizens just confirmed what America had already become.
Teaching poetry in the inner city
Waiting for the other shoe to drop
These sixth-graders knew about ducking from danger; they live on tragic turf (sorry, no table for alliterations, either). They go to school in a city whose violent crime rate in 2012 was three times the national average, a place where nearly 30 percent of the residents squat below the poverty line. And when they wrote, their poems blistered with loss.
Essays
5 minute read