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,…

When I first heard of T.S. Poetry Press, I assumed that the T.S. was drawn from Eliot fame. But a visit to their website corrected my impression. Behind the Press’s founding was a game started by some inventive poets called “tweetspeak.” It’s a “Twitter poetry party,” a one-hour bash where everyone tweets a 140-character poem…

“As a back-of-the-envelope calculation within an order-of-magnitude accuracy,” Skeptic magazine founder Michael Shermer writes in his new book, The Believing Brain, “we can safely say that over the past ten thousand years of history humans have created about ten thousand different religions and about one thousand gods.” Humans have evolved, it seems, a tendency to…

Music might be the thing that in the end helps me keep my faith. I haven’t admitted this to my wife or kids, because I’ve made it abundantly clear that I don’t like the TV show Glee. I really don’t like it; most of the time it annoys the hell out of me. However, we…