It’s Opening Day, and I have a confession to make. It’s not an April Fool. Here it is: it’s Opening Day, and I don’t care. And I’m not sure why. Is it part of the pandemic hangover, part of the “Old Normal” that was ripped away from us a year ago, now lost somewhere amid … Continue reading My Opening Day Confession
How do we find “truth” about what’s going on in our confused & confusing society? One source many often turn to for answers is public polls. If a big time pollster says something is happening, many of us still choose to believe it must be so. A prime example of this phenomenon is the decline … Continue reading The Big News That’s No News: U. S. Church Membership Falls Below 50%
Nick Kristof is the New York Times’s Certified Good-Guy columnist. While he’s an intrepid reporter, who has earned two Pulitzers, he’s best known for an uncanny ability to make even an unfolding tragedy like the one he recounts here feel like an upbeat family story. Almost effortlessly he turns it into what could be the … Continue reading The Nice Guy and the Madman Prophet
From The Guardian: “One of the world’s greatest masterpieces, and surely the most stolen piece of art of all time, Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, also known as the Ghent Altarpiece, has a new €30m (£26m) glass-case home. While remaining within St Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium, for which it … Continue reading A Non-Mystic Report on The Trip I Didn’t Take to Ghent
From the New York Review of Books, March 25 2021: Regina Marler: Fire season in California ended in mid-December, but I can’t bring myself to unpack the boxes near the front door. I threw them together overnight—family photos, backup drives, mementos, passports—in late September, when three wildfires merged, creating the Glass Fire, and burned west … Continue reading Excerpt of the Day: “Emergency Everywhere”