Still Waters

St. Paul was a New Yorker. People from New York are recognizeable by their svelte builds, the glow of 14 karat cultural immersion, and the easy eyes that own everything and are never impressed. Two thousand years ago, you see, Rome was New York. Now it is a tourist trap. That might give New York […]

Slow Leak/Quick End

Although you would expect a pants-on-fire liberal like me to freak out about the BP oil disaster, I found myself oddly unable to get riled up. It’s true, I often compare oil companies to drug dealers. They’re feeding evil, and not evil themselves. I prefer oil companies, since they don’t directly feed cycles of violence […]

Small Groups

I’ve had to read all this stuff about the Holocaust for some work I’m doing this summer. Spend two hours with the Final Solution, and you better be careful with yourself. To clear my head, I watched an episode of “The Wire,” in which a man was beaten to death. Oops. I had been reading […]

Even Ground

Like most sensitive and interesting people, before I was twenty-two, I had got me to a therapist. I was not getting out of bed, and sticky with unhappiness about the end of my growing-up love affair, and I was ready to have someone talk some sense to me. She said, “If you don’t want to […]