My senior year of high school I began working for my mother’s gynecologist. A couple times a week, I would take the 4 or 5 train from my school in Brooklyn Heights to the Upper East Side.
In Philip Roth’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel _American Pastoral_, his protagonist, a Jew named Seymour Levov who goes by the nickname “the Swede,” sees his life turned upside down when his daughter turns terrorist and blows up a post office. … Read More
“But you put me here in America— in rich, white, suburban America, where the people are bland and the food even more so. You put me here in this diner, and I hate you for it.”
Big Star are sacred to me – a summer devotional, everything that John Cusack and Emilio Estevez could never be for me, a holy confessor and mentor. I would be surprised if that other late auteur of American adolescence, John … Read More
“Nobody knows where the future is. Whether it is hiding behind the staggering mosques or the Israeli missiles. Iran: toppling politely over the edge of disaster.”
Pacifism may sound nice, but it is a hard doctrine to maintain: I struggled for years to reconcile my peaceful intuitions with the idea that we live in a violent world, and sometimes aiding those who are suffering might involve lethal force against those inflicting suffering.
