Posts by Staff

In The Battle of the Books, Swift writes that “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.” Self-deception isn’t always that easy, however. Sometimes the reflection on the glass is too familiar to ignore. I’m thankful, then, that as far as satirists go, Claire Messud is as…

“We are surprised if the doctor, by stealing some hours from his daily avocations, attains even moderate eminence in the path of literature.” –Edward Berdoe Incredulity, boredom, a patronizing “isn’t that nice”: these are a few of the responses I receive when folks in or out of the medical profession learn I write in my…

It was late in the evening on Superbowl Sunday. Our son was already asleep and we were in bed, the blue light of our one small television casting a milky glow about the room. Burrowed under the covers, eyes half-closed, I reminded my husband, who goes to work in the middle of the night, that…

The definition of a good memoir, like St. Paul’s famous definition of love, is perhaps better fleshed out in considering what it does not do than what it does. A good memoir, for example, does not ignore the harsh truths of the past, but neither does it delight in placing blame; it does not enlarge…

Robert Benchley once said that there are two kind of people in the world: Those who divide the world in two kinds of people, and those who don’t. I’m more prone to trilogies myself. The world is a set of triangles; not railroad tracks. Therefore, I start with Super Bowl XLII. As you must know,…

>Kudos to ABC for standing by its pilot episode of Eli Stone, in which a young defense attorney, suddenly prone to visions of George Michael singing “Faith” in his home and workplace, ends up representing the plaintiff, a mother who claims the mercury-based preservative in a vaccine caused autism in her son. The American Academy…

I recently reread one of my mother’s books—Mr. Blue, by Myles Connolly, which was first published in 1928. It is a tale of a latter day St. Francis, Mr. Blue, who introduces the narrator to the joy of the Divine. Mr. Blue lives on rooftops and flies kites. On this reading, I found him fey,…

When I first contacted John Dillenberger I was not quite thirty years old and he was not quite seventy. He was a former seminary president and distinguished theologian, with nearly a dozen books to his credit. I was…a guy who wanted to start a journal. I sent off a letter to Dillenberger with a certain…

After reading reviews for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, I became frustrated. The consensus about its central character, Daniel Plainview, was that he was “a great oversize monster who hates all men including therefore himself” (Roger Ebert). My problem? Watching the film, I had related to Daniel. Anderson, who compares Daniel to Dracula,…

How does poetry speak for brokenness, for pained desire, for grief? A couple poems in the current issue of Image raise this question for me: B.H. Fairchild’s dramatic monologue, “Frieda Pushnik” and Robert Cording’s cycle “Four Prayers.” § Fairchild’s speaker is the “Armless, Legless Girl Wonder”—as her obituary in 2000 put it—who made her living…