When the sociologist Timothy Nelson asked low-income men who didn’t live with their children what the ideal father was like, eight of them spontaneously mentioned the same man: Ward Cleaver, the dad from Leave It to Beaver. That might make sense if Nelson’s interviews had taken place in the…
The nickname “El Greco” reveals two things about Doménikos Theotokópoulos, the weird and sublime painter of the Counter-Reformation: He was Greek, and he was a stranger. When everybody around you is Greek, nobody is “the Greek.” El Greco’s vision reflected the second part of his identity even more…
When we speak of “the permanent things,” we should mean the enduring, inescapable, and unfulfilled longings of the contradictory human heart: the helpless yearnings found across radically different times and cultures. And among these permanent desires, the need for home and the need for ecstasy…
A few years ago I was getting a ride home from a party with a guy in his early twenties. I lived in a gentrified neighborhood I could no longer pretend to afford, and he lived, it emerged, with his parents. “Good for you,” I said. “I think that’s great.”
The words “have” and “get” pulse insistently through Jodi Angel’s new short story collection. What you have to do, what you get to do, what you get away with; getting in trouble, getting used to it. Sometimes Angel even doubles up on these words: “My stomach clenched a little and I got ready to get…
“There was a definite puppet-like quality about [Vaslav] Nijinsky’s Petrouchka. He seemed to have limbs of wood and a face made of plaster, in which his eyes resembled nothing so much as two boot buttons. Only now and then did he make you aware that beneath this façade there was a tiny spark of…
The reputation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood has sometimes suffered for its ability to create beautiful surfaces. The paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite artists are replete with lush colors, velvet and gilded textures, flowing locks and tresses. (Nobody in a Pre-Raphaelite painting just has hair.)…
New York
For the past 10 years I’ve volunteered at the Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center, a pro-life Christian ministry in the troubled heart of Washington, D.C. Over this decade of listening to women in crisis, talking with them, helping them find the resources they need, praying with them, hugging them,…
A drug enforcement agent, a friend of a friend, used to say that society is like a skyscraper: Most people stay on one or two floors, only getting to know people about as rich or poor as themselves. Only the cops go to every floor, from the subbasements to the penthouse.
Summer camp! The phrase calls up images of freedom and play: diversions and discoveries, secrets whispered in humid tents, children roaming the woods without getting lost for too long. For the young adults who answered an emergency call for new counselors at a Missouri summer camp in The Inverted…
A Sensitivity to the Seasons
But with the inevitable forward march of progress come new ways of hiding things, and new things to hide. —Chris Ware, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
Almost Christian
Man Ray, African Art, and the Modernist Lens
The Marriage-Go-Round
Sex and the Soul
blog.mode: addressing fashion
Tamburlaine
Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945
Letters to a Young Catholic
THE CAPITOL HILL PREGNANCY CENTER in Washington, D.C., where I've been working as a volunteer for over a year, is a pro-life Christian ministry to pregnant women and poor families. Like most pro-life pregnancy centers, it offers free pregnancy tests, confidential counseling, referrals to outside…
IRANIAN WOMEN can't dance in public, convert from Islam, travel without their husbands' permission, or wear makeup. But they can blog--that is, create weblogs, online journals of news, opinion, or whatever random thoughts tickle the blogger's fancy. And Iran's blogs are the leading edge of an…