‘Fabulous monsters’ are boundary-crossers that reconcile opposites — Today, I’m struck by this passage from Chapter 2 of Robert D. Lane’s Reading the Bible: Intention, Text, Interpretation (first published 1994, republished 2018 free online). “Another characteristic of myth is its binary aspect: seeming opposites as heaven and earth, male and female, living and dead, good and evil, first…

Stories for those who feel ‘fragile about frogs’ — Today is the long-awaited release of Real Sugar is Hard to Find, a story collection by Sim Kern. It’s set in a time, or times, of ecological collapse—speculative futures, but also, in a sense, the now. The stories stride at “the intersections of climate change, reproductive justice, queer identities, and…

‘How Evil Works’ (2010) by the editor of WorldNetDaily — In 2010, Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster, published David Kupelian’s book How Evil Works: Understanding and Overcoming The Destructive Forces That Are Transforming America. Kupelian was, and still is today, managing editor for WorldNetDaily, which, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, is dedicated to “manipulative fear-mongering…

Reflections on the Pulitzer-winning ‘Gödel, Escher, Bach’ (1979) — Today I read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter, which is a math book, and since everything is trans, let me tell you something trans. The idea here is that formal systems encounter truths they can’t prove. In mathematics, anyway. Hofstadter is explaining Gödel’s incompleteness…

Hint: If you’re thinking about it, you already know how to know — Two monks discussed what they saw above the Buddhist temple. One said: The flag is moving. The other said: The wind is moving. They argued. Along came the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng, who said they were both wrong: It’s your minds that are moving. It’s an old story. You can find…

‘The Optimist’s Telescope’ by Bina Venkataraman — In her preface to The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age (2019), Bina Venkataraman explains: “For seven years and counting, I have been investigating what allows wisdom to prevail over recklessness; what role our biological programming, our environment, and our culture play; and what changes…

It’s hard to say how much. How much is the planet worth? — At the end of 2004, soon after President George W. Bush’s election to a second term, I was writing a final article for my journalism degree with a concentration in International and Security Issues. A lot of our class discussion had been about Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which started several…

Will the January 6 House Committee‘s primetime crime showdown change the outcome? — U.S. democracy is nearly dead. At this point, it doesn’t look salvageable. The Path to Authoritarianism “The American system isn’t just dysfunctional. It’s dying,” political scientist Brian Klaas writes in The Atlantic today. That’s because “one of the two major parties in the U.S. — the Trumpified Republican Party — has become authoritarian to…

Am I successful? Maybe not. But I’m qualified to ask these questions. — Commercial chatter about “how to achieve success!” usually sounds, to me, as if we’re supposed to know (1) what sorts of things or experience define “success,” (2) how we know when we achieve them, (3) how we avoid mistaken notions of success, (4) how to iterate our self-awareness as needed…