I was struck recently by a similarity between three articles on three different topics: the experiences of people who accidentally kill someone, problems with the disease model of addiction, a soldier who tried to contact the family of a civilian he killed in Iraq. Each of the articles is worth reading in full, but I've… Read More
Month: September 2017
Lewis Hyde on Usury
I love Lewis Hyde's Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art, so I recently checked to see if he wrote other books, and, thus, read his The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. One chapter is focused on usury. Hyde explains that the first Christian pawnshops were allowed on the condition that charging interest was… Read More
Losing My Child at Easter
My husband and I lost our first child at 6 weeks at Easter in 2017. I wrote this essay to thank the women who cared for me in extraordinary ways while we grieved. "One week after we lost our baby, the Gospel reading was the story of the apostle Thomas poking his finger into the… Read More
Daniel Tammet on wordplay, poetry, and language-learning
When I read Thinking in Numbers, the first book I encountered by Daniel Tammet, I ordered a copy for myself before I was halfway done with the library copy. I loved the way he wrote about math. And, in his new book, Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing, I love the way he writes… Read More
Farewell to the small graces of Great Comet
"Natasha and Pierre’s marriage is hundreds of pages away (and Andrey will reconcile with Natasha and die before that comes to pass). The change in Natasha is simply this, as she describes it, “For the first time in many days, I weep tears of gratitude, tears of tenderness, tears of thanks.” Nothing has been solved… Read More