“They’re dead where it doesn’t count,” says Fletcher, a newspaperman, in an episode of the current and last season of HBO’s The Wire, which I saw recently. I don’t subscribe to HBO, so I was watching at a friend’s. And I was jumping ahead; since discovering the series on Netflix six months ago, I’ve spent…

Maybe the only way to make films set in places that people have too precise an idea about is to indulge that idea, make it even more precise, to the point where it becomes a caricature of itself. In other words, go ahead and give them what they expect, so that something larger and more…

Our first post-wedding-vows fight occurred somewhere between Omaha and Sioux Falls, in a sagging Paseo stuffed with all the wedding gifts that Ben couldn’t force into our U-Haul. A week earlier, we had married in my Missouri hometown; now, we were moving to his home in Montana. As our car lumbered up the snowy interstate,…

I don’t have the time to write this. With the Writers Guild strike now over, and in its place a sudden deadline for a script, I came close to telling this blog’s editor, Greg Wolfe, that I simply couldn’t make tomorrow’s due date for this, my third post. For better or worse, I’ve never been…

Recently, I was home sick catching up on my reading. Flipping through an accumulation of The Economist magazines, I began in the back with the obituaries…a singular and fascinating specialty of this publication. What greeted me was the obituary of German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who died December 5 at the age of 79. Ironically, I…

Greg Wolfe’s editorial in Image issue 56 makes a convincing case for beauty, the stepchild in the classic trio of transcendentals: truth, beauty, and goodness. I’d like to throw into the conversation a lunchtime chat I had last summer at Image’s Glen Workshop — with sculptor Ginger Geyer, who was on the faculty that year. Ginger’s porcelain…

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…