A Letter from Home

  Despite being brought up by generous, loving people, I never felt at home in the suburban tract house where I misspent my youth. My dad was a slick-talking charmer who hadn’t energy for much beyond drinking, gambling, and chasing women, though he was, in his way, generous...
Read More →

THE WEAPONIZATION OF LONELINESS: HOW TYRANTS STOKE OUR FEAR OF ISOLATION TO SILENCE, DIVIDE, AND CONQUER and THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TOTALITARIANISM

  THE WEAPONIZATION OF LONELINESS: HOW TYRANTS STOKE OUR FEAR OF ISOLATION TO SILENCE, DIVIDE, AND CONQUER Stella Morabito (Bombardier Books, 2022, paper, 304 pages, $19.99) THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TOTALITARIANISM Mattias Desmet (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022, hardcover, 240...
Read More →

Uncle Frank’s Candy Store

    The inside of the place was rinsed in shadow, dust particles swirling in the opaque light. Newspapers were stacked on the counter; a local rag trumpeting rape and murder and a smudged racetrack tip sheet lay nearby. On the wall, a mounted cigarette rack housed...
Read More →

To Change the World

    “The future belongs to people with children, not with things,” wrote Charles Chaput in First Things a few months ago. If you are young and you want to change the world, counsels the Catholic archbishop emeritus of Philadelphia, then “get married, stay faithful to one...
Read More →

Henry James and the Ties of Family

Recently, we have heard a good deal about the family during our national discontents. Those sworn to the progressive ideology blame the family for perpetuating what the Soviets used to call “dissidence”; they even go so far as to insist that children denounce parents if they fail...
Read More →

The Economics of Abortion

  In the days following the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft of the Dobbs case, which threatens Roe v Wade, Amazon announced it would contribute up to $4000 to any employee who must travel to get an abortion.  Abortion as economics.  A court decision may not affect overmuch...
Read More →

On What We Inherit—and What We Pass On

My mother grew up in Rego Park, Queens, New York. She said the developer who named the town got “Rego” from a contraction of “Real Good.” The daughter of strict German immigrants, being raised in the shadow of World War II, she embodied the first-generation ethos of dreams...
Read More →

Dreams in a Pandemic

  I am the proud owner of a coffee mug that displays wisely worded encouragement from Thoreau: Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined. I got it at a high-end “Second Time Around” sale at a well-heeled Episcopal Church in New York City—for...
Read More →

With New Eyes

I am rarely left speechless. Snappy retorts are part of my native language, and those few times when my mother’s instructions for what to do when I cannot say anything nice dominate my response, the conversation in question is likely a memorable one. Oddly enough, these...
Read More →

Lessons from a Foster Family

  It was two in the morning when a little round face popped up from the mattress, looked right and left, and then asked, “Umma?” He was ten months old and had already mastered the intonation of a question. It was two in the morning when I patted my little son on the back and...
Read More →
12