Blog
What is a Vice?
A “vice” is many things: a multi-purpose tool (bench vice, vice grip); a Canadian-American magazine; a rank lower than the one without the vice (vice admiral, vice president); something you could get caught in; a morally depraved and sick and wrong personal, political or so...
What is Virtue? And Who is Virtuous?
Common definitions of the word “virtue” — particularly in the English-speaking “West” — include “behavior showing high moral standards” (e.g., “paragons of virtue”); “a quality considered morally good or desirable in a person” (e.g., “patience is a virtue”); “a...
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Love Requires Joy
Thirty-two years ago I found myself on top of the world. The music and arts newspaper I had launched a couple of years earlier had, after a shaky start, achieved a status, clout and popularity few thought possible even a year earlier. Founders of an all-girl power-pop band wh...
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Keeps On Ticking
My brother, Paul, was killed in a motor vehicle accident forty-seven years ago, on Monday, January 2nd, 1978. Born on Mother’s Day, May 13th, 1962, he did not live long enough to celebrate his sixteenth birthday, which would have fallen on Saturday, May 13th, 1978. Nor did h...
We Took the Bullet
In the weeks leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, as we drove back to our Goose Hollow neighborhood, my daughter, her then boyfriend (now husband), and I attempted to come to a coherent understanding of where the candidates stood. We had just eaten supper...
We failed to dodge the bullet.
In the early afternoon this past Sunday, I listened to a discussion between four authors — the writer Naomi Klein and New Yorker staff writers Kyle Chayka, Andrew Marantz, and Jia Tolentino — on a topic billed as the “Digital Culture Wars.” The discussio...
