The Barbershop

Cities, Common Spaces, and the Coronavirus

To be isolated from one another, and in particular from those third places where the rich possibilities of community are most regularly realized strains urban interdependence as nothing else.

The Local Game

The baseball season has ended. For fans just about everywhere outside of Boston, this will signal either melancholy or relief. Or possibly disgust. Melancholy...

And To All A Good Night

Too soon the mistletoe will be a garland.

Mud: Our Alma-Pater

If the institutions that oversee our slow twelve-to-eighteen-year process of education are called our alma-mater (nourishing mother), why can’t the dirt-filled, dung-laden places that convey agrarian lessons taught over 20 years be our nourishing father (alma-pater)?

The Promise and Forgiveness of Hillbilly Elegy

Hillbilly Elegy is indeed political, but in a deeper sense, entangled as it is in the webs of broken promises and repeated forgiveness.

The Republic of a Restaurant

We sense that there’s more at stake in a restaurant visit than simply gustatorial or financial gain. Eating out, as Plato might have observed, is a chance to reinforce or undermine the rule of the rational over the appetitive soul.

Why We Camp… And Why We Don’t

As evening arrives, you put on warmer clothes and make a campfire, arguing over which is the best design method, the teepee or the log cabin. Once it gets going, you sit with your loved ones in a circle around the fire and just stare at it uncontrollably. You are mesmerized and instantly calm.

A Rant Against Satellite Photos and in Defense of Starlit Skies

In our day, we cannot ourselves see the heavens; we can only see pixelated images of heaven produced by computer screens. In this respect, we already live in virtual reality.

Camping and Homemaking

You can’t actually get to utopia; it only seems like you can because it looms so large. I think it’s better to start wherever you are, and ask what it needs you to do.

Muhammad Ali: Can the Greatest of All Time Speak to Our...

By holding up the life of Muhammad Ali, Ken Burns seems to be asking us pressing questions: can we maintain our principles and move from outspoken and oppositional to loving and virtuous? Will we use our beauty and gifts not to belittle others but to better them?