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Lucky Life: Poetry in Motion
Friday January 27, 2012
I’ve been waiting for a chance to share this movie with you for two years. In Lucky Life, the new film by Lee Isaac Chung, three friends—a writer named Mark, his wife Karen, and their friend Alex—drive to join their friend Jason at a North Carolina beach house. They’ve been friends for years, but this vacation is unusual. Jason has an aggressive form of cancer, and he probably won’t be with them much longer. They share conversations, walks on the beach, memories. Okay, let’s face it, that’s not the....
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Offending the Experts
Thursday January 26, 2012
I read that famed biologist E.O. Wilson provoked a tempest by claiming a genetic basis for social cooperation that has the politically unfortunate side-effect of undermining a widely embraced explanation for the persistence of homosexuality. If he’s right, we’re stuck with an uncomfortable reality that homosexuality is a choice, or a learned behavior, or something that sounds equally unsavory in the parlors....
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The Tale of the Foreman
Wednesday January 25, 2012
So my father told a story of his own grandfather—one I had heard often but that astounds me every time it’s related. The moral dilemma is a perfect example of what can face a human being, a tale positively Greek in both its heroic and tragic components. His name was Jones McWhorter, and he lived in Houston, Mississippi. He had a fine job as a railroad foreman—an occupation hard to come by in the depths....
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This Is Your Brain on Art
Tuesday January 24, 2012
I went to a middle school dance the other night to watch my son’s band play the four songs they know. What I observed probably won’t surprise you. The boys at the dance reacted to the rock & roll. They jumped and wiggled—some even did what might be considered dancing—and ran and threw their bodies against the padded walls under the basketball hoops. Mature enough to know better, the girls stood....
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Winterland
Monday January 23, 2012
Who shall sing of winter and its transcendence? O not the Swiss mountains or the Colorado valleys, but of a streetcorner in Medford, Massachusetts, on a 15 degree day: a little storefront shopette thronged with teenage deadbeats in leather car coats and jeans, cigarette smoke tendrilling through their elaborate feathered hair, kicking at clods of dirty snow....
Artist of the Month
Steven Greydanus
Film reviewer Steven Greydanus is an omnivore, but a discriminating one. In his prolific reviews at his blog, DecentFilms.com, and at the National Catholic Register, he covers nearly every film that comes to theaters....
Current Issue
Issue 71
Fiction by Larry Woiwode, interview with Joe Henry, art by Fabian Debora, essay by Barry Moser.
Good Letters: The Image Blog
