Ellen Wilson Fielding

Our fickle age usually welcomes the new, the original, the untried. But no one I know places the “novel virus” Covid-19 in a happy category, and rightly so. The pandemic has led us to live—and sadly in some cases, end—our days in modes novel to us, but to paraphrase Yeats, with... Read More →

At the close of World War II, Gen. Douglas MacArthur headed the American occupation forces in Japan. As part of the plan to eliminate Japanese militarism and Emperor-worship, and to encourage the democratization of the Japanese people, the occupation forces disseminated examples... Read More →

Recently a friend saw Fiddler on the Roof and remarked on how much darker the plot was than he had remembered. It’s a musical, after all, and most musicals (barring West Side Story-style romantic tragedy or Sweeney Todd-style bizarreness) are upbeat. It has a lot of comic scenes... Read More →

  Every advance in information technology and every expanded frontier for its use seems to propagate media stories of new ways that governments and industries are infringing upon the once sacrosanct zone of individual privacy. From facial recognition software to cars that... Read More →

  When I was a child, and the neighborhood pack of kids I ran with started squabbling about what to play or how to play it, sooner or later someone would end up yelling, “You can’t tell me what to do! It’s a free country!” Both the assertion and its justification are... Read More →

  Once I heard a futures trader explain the thought processes behind his job, and the way he explained it illuminated a mindset about earning a living alien to my own. Oh, I already knew the basics about his daily activity: buying and selling futures of commodities, with the... Read More →

  Last Sunday the Catholic Church celebrated the Feast of Christ the King. Conjuring up images of thrones, royal robes, and scepters, it is a feast day that can strike secularized Western societies like ours as particularly alien. An Australian bishop recently expressed a... Read More →

Even good things—perhaps especially good things—can be desired too much, or in the wrong way, or potentially so. Take babies, for instance. To be specific, take Rose, the baby daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Devotees of the Little House on the Prairie series of frontier books... Read More →

  Lately my grandson’s interest in the Marvel and DC comics world of superheroes has been turning his mind to the conundrums of time travel and the intricacies of rewriting the past. My own pop-culture exposure to time-travel plotlines dates from the Back to the Future... Read More →

  Last week my office held a baby shower for a coworker and his eight-months-pregnant wife. It is their first baby, and there was lots of conversation about the nursery, the childbirth classes—all the usual things. And there was one of those cutesy baby-shower games: On... Read More →