I’ve never liked the fall. Beautiful as it is, it’s too nostalgic for me, too fraught with endings, reminiscences, and bittersweet goodbyes. The only unequivocal joy about the season is football, and that’s not enough to make me change my mind. Because fall means winter is coming, and I can’t stand the cold. So spring…

As one of the billions who watched the Chilean miners being brought to the surface from a subterranean tomb, I listened as journalists warned of awful physical and mental breakdowns that could occur at any moment. Horrors were afoot, and teams of specialists were on hand, as they would surely be needed. But one by…

There’s a 1920s film clip, available on YouTube, of George Bernard Shaw jauntily arguing that anyone who can’t explain his cost to society should not be allowed to live in it. Said the celebrated playwright: “[I]f you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the…

A week or so ago, I stood in a place that’s one of my favorites, looking out upon a view that I’ll always consider the best, and at a time of day that did the whole experience justice—though in truth, no time is a bad one to stand there. I went to this place because…

Among the register of things once known, now less known, is the fundamental capacity to spell. And if it would seem that a loss so detrimental to the world of letters—in truth, to the civilized world—would raise a greater alarm, such is not the case. Never before has such degeneracy been found less worrisome, less…

With a pregnant wife, a high school chemistry teacher’s salary, a sinkhole of debt, and a teenage son suffering from cerebral palsy, Walter White is pushed to the limits of composure. The focus of AMC’s original series Breaking Bad, Walt (Bryan Cranston) must also abide insolent students and obnoxious in-laws. It’s enough to make anyone…

Upon seeing Mickey Rourke as has-been mat star Randy “The Ram” Robinson in The Wrestler, I became nostalgic. When I was a boy, you could get the TV wrestling matches from Memphis on Saturdays, wherein Jerry “The King” Lawler took on the likes of Tojo Yamamoto (managed by the dastardly Saul Wiengeroff). Me and my…

[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…

Tempting as it is, I mostly resist the urge to sacralize my preferences and hallow my velleities. So while I’ve heard that looking “deep” into Dark Side of the Moon will reveal a kind of religious experience stated in an inverse way, I can only reply: “But looking at it in another, more realistic way,…

It’s a horrible thing to be stranded within your native tongue when no one around you shares it. The mind rages at its helplessness. In such situations, rhetorical matters are irrelevant: the niceties of tropes and figures, the arrangement of thoughts, the cadence of delivery—all useless. We can even feel as though we move among…