The first paper I wrote in graduate school didn’t really work as an academic argument. I was trying to claim something about domestic imagery in the writing of Julian of Norwich, but even after months of attempting to formulate a thesis that worked, I just couldn’t wrangle a coherent meaning out of it. It just…

For the third time this week I’ve encountered someone who wants to talk about music. And I’m delighted. I love to talk about music. He’s just found out that I write about music for one of my paychecks, and he’s eager to engage in a spirited conversation. “So,” he says, “do you think there’s ever…

Continued from yesterday. In the postmodern era, which some see as coincident with the post-Christian era, an era in which the tethers connecting ethics and morals to Christianity have loosened, there is no such thing as truth—even Christians speak in terms of cultural norms and choice. Those who see recent history in this way understand…

I’ve been listing to Arcade Fire’s 2010 album The Suburbs on a continuous loop over the last few days while I read and re-read passages of Reza Aslan’s Beyond Fundamentalism: Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization. The book was chosen from a field of others to be the Common Reading text for the…

To tame a lion, you need a good chair. That’s one of the lessons that Dave Hoover, a wild animal trainer, shares in Errol Morris’s documentary Fast, Cheap and Out of Control. Why a chair? Because, he explains, a cat has only one point of interest. If a lion’s charging at you, it’s best to…

The movie The Help has been out almost a month by now, but the surrounding hubbub seems in no way to be subsiding. Heated discussions about the film and its portrayal of the early civil rights era have raged across the internet, the style sections of the newspaper, and public radio call-in programs. Based on…

I’m a Mac user now, but back when I had PCs, I would occasionally run a utility called “disk defragmenter.” You’d click some options and after several grinding minutes you’d get a message like, “Your disk is 46% fragmented. Defragment?” I doubt anyone really understood what it did. It was just something to try when…

I’m a Mac user now, but back when I had PCs, I would occasionally run a utility called “disk defragmenter.” You’d click some options and after several grinding minutes you’d get a message like, “Your disk is 46% fragmented. Defragment?” I doubt anyone really understood what it did. It was just something to try when…

The grid is the plan above the earth. It is a compass of possibilities. —D.J. Waldie, Holy Land During the time I spent completing my MFA, I worked for months on a single essay about the south suburbs of Chicago, where I spent my youth and young adulthood. I had just moved to Michigan, and…

I hate this country I love. —Gretel, “Turn the Lights Back On” I’ve never really thought to see if any other Mississippians feel this way, but whenever anyone not from here criticizes the South in general or Mississippi in particular, I tend to become not so much defensive as rabid and accusatory. Case in point,…