The Home of the Brave

Before the 1680s, a “bigot” referred specifically to a person intolerant of other religions. After that time, it expanded to intolerance of all sorts of things– other races and cultures, for example. The idea that there should not be a mosque near ground zero is covered before and after 1680. There is no good reason […]

Glamour

Late at night, I pulled into my driveway and saw that somebody was standing out on my landlord’s side porch, working the grill. I had just gotten back from a three-week sojourn in my favorite city. Sigh. “Hey,” I called out. I didn’t usually talk to this guy much. He worked for my landlord, handyman […]

Borders

It doesn’t matter how you treat a dead body. The dead wasp I vacuumed off my floor yesterday is just as dead as my great-grandfather– as far as science can tell us, anyway. Death means a lack of mattering. I appreciate how Buddhists try to get us comfortable with that, impossible as it may be. […]

Mummified

For all we know, the soul of Perneb is wandering around, flustered, like a smoker without a Quik Trip at 3 am. Perneb believed, or at least some of his friends and family believed, that he needed a tomb with a false door to keep his soul nourished. Unfortunately, Mr. Edward S. Harkness gave Perneb’s […]