I eventually discovered that coots aren’t ducks at all. They just blend in the way a toupee blends in—convincing from a distance, questionable up close. Ducks belong to the Anatidae family, while coots are in the Rallidae family, which means they are technically rails. In a genealogical sense, they’re more closely related to cranes than to mallards. But try telling that to a coot surrounded by actual ducks.
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Tilting Time and Shifting Space: Learning from JoAnn Verburg
Finally, after a month of working with TTArtisan 50mm 1.4, I was able to take it on a trip to New York City. While there, I wanted to give this way of seeing the world the ultimate test. Could I use these tools to explore and communicate a new experience of what it means to be human?
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“Trajectory”
⎺ Original Poetry from J.D. Smith
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On Changing Lifespans and Hobnobbing with Poets
Articles of note from the world wide web.
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Reckless Hope
Too often, people try to reduce Revelation to a riddle to be solved, as though the beasts and bowls, trumpets and thrones could be decoded into a neat timeline. To be sure, apocalyptic language has a logic to it—a symbolic grammar that can and should be studied, much like one might analyze poetry or music. Understanding the meaning of those symbols is part of engaging the text; in some ways, Revelation is like a puzzle. But it can’t stop there. Once you’ve “figured it out,” you don’t simply close the book, heave a sigh of intellectual satisfaction, and move on. To do so would be like pulling apart the pieces…
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Self-Portrait After an Election
This process of testing myself in front of different pieces wasn’t just a matter of finding an image to fit my mood—the way you might scroll through a streaming service at the end of the day, hoping to find something that will scratch your particular itch. It was a process of clarification, of clarifying what I really thought and felt. In testing my own frame of mind against the framing of these artworks, I was distinguishing between what I was really experiencing and what I thought I should be experiencing, or saw others experiencing around me.
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Happy Public Domain Day, 2025
Happy New Year's Day, readers — and Happy Public Domain Day. Every January 1st, we get to celebrate not only the greatest day of college football but also the greatest day for release from copyright of great works of literature, music, art, and other previously copyrighted material — at least in the United States.
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“The Solitary Walk”
⎺ Original Poetry from Henry Lewis
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On Revival, Reading, and “Fruit Detectives”
“Is the World Ready for a Religious Comeback?” by Ross Douthat in The New York Times So the world seems primed for religious arguments in the same way it was primed for the new atheists 20 years ago. But the question is whether the religious can reclaim real cultural ground—especially in the heart of secularism, the Western intelligentsia—as opposed to just stirring up a vague nostalgia for belief. “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that,…
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Featured Artist: Stephanie Hunder
Stephanie Hunder’s art is inspired by memories of growing up in the woodlands and prairies of Minnesota. Her work often begins with forms and textures drawn from landscapes, which are then combined with scientific diagrams as a way to investigate our contemporary relationship to the natural world.
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Bored at the Museum
When you enter the room where it’s hanging, even before you fully register what the painting represents, the pleasure is already there, just as you turn the corner and see it on the wall.
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London on the Man Without a Past
Brissenden was always an enigma. With the face of an ascetic, he was, in all the failing blood of him, a frank voluptuary. He was unafraid to die, bitter and cynical of all the ways of living; and yet, dying, he loved life, to the last atom of it. He was possessed by a madness to live, to thrill, "to squirm my little space in the cosmic dust whence I came," as he phrased it once himself. He had tampered with drugs and done many strange things in quest of new thrills, new sensations. As he told Martin, he had once gone three days without water, had done so voluntarily,…
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Stephen Spender on Loneliness and American Literature
Intense loneliness gives all great American literature something in common, the sense of a lonely animal moving through the dark, like the wolves in a story of Jack London, the White Whale chased across a waste of seas in Melville, the sensitive and exploitable young American seeking his own soul through ruined European places, of James.
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Nick Cave on the Artistic Impulse and Other Responsibilities
The creative urge is a gift not afforded to everyone, and those of us who possess it bear a responsibility to pursue that impulse wholeheartedly. However, there are other duties beyond those at the tip of your brush or nib of my pen — beautiful and sacrificial fidelities. You have committed to your wife and son to offer them more than just the crumbs of yourself, the dregs of what remains of you after a day with the devil in the shed. You are in service to your creative impulses — and by the same token to God — but you are also in service to the world as it presents…
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Polanyi on Tradition and the Intellectual Life
I must admit now that I did not start the present reconsideration of my beliefs with a clean slate of unbelief. Far from it. I started as a person intellectually fashioned by a particular idiom, acquired through my affiliation to a civilization that prevailed in the places where I had grown up, at this particular period of history. This has been the matrix of all my intellectual efforts. Within it I was to find my problem and seek the terms for its solution. All my amendments to these original terms will remain embedded in the system of my previous beliefs.
