Belief

I don’t trust the answers or the people who give me the answers. I believe in dirt and bone and flowers and fresh pasta and salsa cruda and red wine. I don’t believe in white wine; I insist on color.

— Charles Bowden

Smut

As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my aunt Hortense, “To be smut it must be utterly without redeeming social importance.”

— Tom Lehrer

Moyers and Company Reckon With Torture

Of all the things for which the United States will be called upon to justify in years to come, the systematic imprisonment and torture of many of those whom it’s various official and quasi-official agents suspected of participating in the attacks of 11 September should be at the top of the list. However as it(…)

Arctic Autumn; A Journey to a Season’s Edge

As Dunne so well repeatedly depicts, our modern interpretations of time are not appropriately applied to the Arctic. Autumn does not begin with the turning of the leaves; it begins – biologically as well as metaphorically – at the first second following the Summer Solstice.