Slow Muse

Lynn Nottage, playwright (Photograph: Bryan Derballa) Hollywood gossip isn’t typically my thing. But the controversy that has erupted between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni touches into so many “in this moment” memes, trends and themes that it has taken up residence in the public square. Some of this reminds me of the “blue/black” or “white/gold” […]

Diary of a Tap Dancer (Photo: Nile Scott Studios and Maggie Hall) Looking for travel lanes in the current cultural landscape—one that has become increasingly complex, narrowbanded, detoured and unpredictable—has become a fraught undertaking. Maybe it’s just me and my navigational tools that are outdated or arcane. But I can’t seem to find the currents […]

“You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world… The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even but a millimeter the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” ​–James […]

Last year a group of us heard a presentation by Dario Robleto at the Fogg Museum. (More about that here.) Robleto is a refreshingly unpretentious artist who is doing his work without the sandbaggery of fads, posturing and artifice. His projects have gestated in the liminal space between science and art. Working under the canopy […]

“At moments of historical crisis, when the necessity of choice generates fears and neuroses, men are eager to trade the doubts and agonies of moral responsibility for determinist visions, conservative or radical, which give them “the peace of imprisonment, a contented security, a sense of having at last found one’s proper place in the cosmos.” […]

“We are building something immense together that, though invisible and immaterial, is a structure, one we reside within—or, rather, many overlapping structures. They’re assembled from ideas, visions and values emerging out of conversations, essays, editorials, arguments, slogans, social-media messages, books, protests, and demonstrations. About race, class, gender, sexuality; about nature, power, climate, the interconnectedness of […]