Boarding House at the End of the World
Zoning laws, housing codes, and a culture marked by suspicion and antisociality make it difficult to revive the boarding house, a living arrangement that once applied to nearly half of the population.
Unpacking My Library (Again)
Maybe, in the end, a home library does what a long-inhabited home does: charts a middle ground between the chaos of the world and the hyper-rationality of modernity.
Hunting Silence
To find these deeper wells of silence, however, we must seek them out, whether in the woods or the deserts of our own shut doors.
On Not Losing Our Minds to Technology
A machine can read books out loud to the baby. A machine can rock the baby to sleep. Smart devices and apps can do these and many other things. But they can do none of them in love.
The Uglification of Michigan Lake Towns
America is known for its English-Protestant roots, for the pilgrims who settled the Eastern seaboard and the Anglos who descended from them. But America has a French-Catholic history, too, and Northern Michigan is a central location in that history.
Medieval Hillbilly Kings, Priests, Pagans, and Poets: Beowulf, Johnny Cash, and...
Cash may as well be situated in an Anglo-Saxon mead hall, a broken ring-giver, a pagan, who for all his good intentions, cannot heal that which infects his people and himself.
Boom Towns Go Bust
Civil society relies on common spaces where people of all backgrounds can meet, but states and cities have been pursuing semi-privatization of public spaces.
Sigmund Freud’s Grief
In expressing his love through epistolary lament, it may be that Freud discovered the precise meaning he felt he had lost.
American Holland and Dutch America: On the Exoticization of Culture
Culture is the ever-evolving play that takes place on that stage, as new props come and old props are replaced, even as the theater remains the same. Of course, the play is influenced by the stage and interacts with it.