New Perspectives, Old Simplicities

Ever since those astonishing photos taken by the Webb telescope were released my inbox has been filled with emails discussing them. It’s a mixed bag of astonishment, wonder, and, well, horror.  Seems more than a few people have been sent spinning into existential dread, right along with the stars and galaxies spinning in the images.…

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You Are Only Free When Everyone Is Free

  My friend, Robin Bates, author of Better Living Through Beowulf, wrote a wonderful essay that threw me back in my seat, exactly as a passage from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer did to him. Everything that needs to be said is here, so I am reprinting it, with his permission.  He says: “Sometimes I’ll come across…

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An Age of Questions

What a week. A new Supreme Court Justice, the first Black woman. And oh, what work she has to do since SCOTUS has overturned Roe vs Wade and has effectively gutted the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to fight climate change.  Sadly, more absurd decisions are expected in the future. Then there is the war in Ukraine,…

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