Wonder, terror, awe: emotions that are no longer part of our experience. Science has disenchanted the world; technology has robbed it of its threats.

Of Isfahan in the mid-seventeenth century, French traveler Jean Chardin wrote, “It is the grandest and the most beautiful town in the whole of the east” and its surrounding countryside “incomparable for its beauty and fertility.” Situated on the central Iranian Plain, at the vertex of trade routes, Chardin found the city a bustling hub of commerce and education as populous as London, with broad tree-edged avenues and lanes as agreeable as those in Paris ...

"There is no there there," Gertrude Stein said of the Bay Area. But there, she is.

Forgotten American writer John Horne Burns's World War II novel The Gallery, published in 1947 to great acclaim, made him briefly famous. Reading it then, I could hardly believe how closely Burns’s story paralleled my own coming of age as a young GI in North Africa and Italy. I still remember that gift with gratitude, and now I wanted to try to make sense of his short, disappointed life.

Black and white isn't all that black and white.

And those resolutions are: I will lose that flab by getting off the cultural fast-food... Read more →

The news that Disney has hired Britney Spears to be a role-model for the studio’s... Read more →

Good morning, class.  Today we’ll talk about language. Let’s compare these two... Read more →

The Color Purple, To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye – classics of American... Read more →

As Republican hopefuls walk the runway for the 2012 race, and as we near the November... Read more →