NOTE: The following contains references that might be considered spoilers about the conclusion of the film Penelope. I can’t stop thinking about Christina Ricci’s nose. Let me explain. On a date last week, Anne and I watched a tricky little fairy tale called Penelope. The film made only a cameo appearance in theaters, then vanished…

[NOTE: Good Letters celebrates its one-year anniversary today. Please give a big virtual round of applause to the dozen writers who have donated their incredible gifts to making this blog possible. ] From a safe, comfortable distance, those with self-satisfied hearts often reproach the likes of Walt Kowalski, Clint Eastwood’s character in the sleeper hit…

I have been writing about the intersection of pop music and religion for as long as I can remember. As I teenager, I made four issues of a zine (never published outside an old Macintosh computer) called Toxic Chalk, which balanced my love of rocking out with a lot of complaining about Christian music. I’m…

Note: If you are an absolute newcomer to the current Battlestar Galactica TV series and think you might want to catch up, this post contains spoilers. I wonder if anyone has said that the Sci-Fi Channel’s timing was off when it decided to air the first episode of the last season (or rather, half-season) of…

“If life has no standing as mystery or miracle or gift, then what signifies the difference between it and death?”                                                                                                                   —Wendell Berry The evening of December 29 settled clear and cold, and my family was out in it, skiing on an Appalachian mountainside. As my wife and I rode the chairlift, the merest sliver…

His name was Peter, and he carried an L.L. Bean canvas bag, monogrammed and trimmed in forest green. It was December 28, 1988, and I noticed him at the gate. Preppy, but kind of cute. And then we boarded, and he took the seat next to mine. American Airlines; JFK to SFO; a DC-10, which…

January marks the anniversary of several family catastrophes. I keep trying to laugh about it, to applaud the humor of the general bloodletting. The impulse to laugh when things are really bad is a congenital defect—or a Darwinian asset, depending on how you look at it. My parents started it, and my three sisters and…

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” is more or less what I told my husband when he proposed creating me an account on Facebook. If you have even less experience than I with the now ubiquitous “social networking utility,” Facebook is a website where you can add brief diary entries, family and party pictures to…

With this post we welcome another contributor to Good Letters. Joel will be focusing mostly on music. One thing that I learned in 2008 is that everything is going to keep changing, all the time, and is always going to be not what it was last year. And what I want from songs now is…

Inspired by a similar tradition in David Brooks’ New York Times column (but with fewer pretensions to comprehensiveness—I am calling them favorites, not the most important or influential), here is a list of five essays or reviews that I have read, on the internet, which I think are worth printing out to read and ponder…