It has long been recognized that getting an education is effective for bettering oneself and one’s chances in the world. But a degree and an education are not necessarily synonymous. Credentialing, not educating, has become the primary...
Pursuing the effect of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “He heightens worth who guardedly diminishes,” Charles Wright’s early lyrics are taut, controlled, and highly compressed. Although their diction is neither unnatural nor stilted, the poems are...
The poems I have chosen to memorize over the years answer to an odd mixture of social occasions and opportunities. When asked to perform a poem at nonacademic parties, I have found Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” not among the poems Harold...
Francis Crick winged into the Eagle, a pub popular with researchers at Cambridge University’s nearby Cavendish Laboratory, boasting to one and all, “We have found the secret of life.” It was early in 1953, and the “we” referred to thirty...
Visitors fortunate enough to have seen “The Moon Has No Home” were introduced to a striking new perspective on an art form that has enthralled interested viewers since the 1854 opening of Japan to the West. The show’s very title hints at...
Two pairs of shoes still in their boxes: a pair of clean new Hongmahwang loafers and a pair of gilded, tacky Italian slippers. The footwear of a madman caught last December hiding in a rat-filled hole almost within sight of one of his many...
Cursing, I slam down the receiver and run out of the house, shout for Bro. He stands by his car still parked on the street. Arms folded, he turns to me, a stocky young man with black hair and a heavy mustache. He wears a leather jacket and...