In Praise of Dolly Parton, 1946-2026, Our Goddess of Kindness

We will always love her, and there will never be another like her, this artist who came out of deep rural poverty in the 1960s to become not just a staggeringly great performer and songwriter but philanthropist, humanist, humorist, and – well there's a way she demonstrated that lots

The Right Word is Wrongness

I've been in northern New Mexico for more than two weeks, in what is normally the monsoon season, but there has been no rain beyond a brief, quickly evaporated spatter of drops three times so far. The plants are parched, and the usual green regeneration of monsoon season

A is for Airtight Categories, B for Blanket Statements, C for Cherrypicking....

I spend a lot of time thinking about our habits of mind, overarching stories, and unexamined assumptions that shape thought. Because behind the events that shape our world are communications and representations and behind them are thoughts and ideas and frameworks and so the equipment of our minds shapes the

Cynicism and Naïveté in the Summer of a Thousand Fires

To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (“They don’t mean me”) or by despair (“There’s nothing we can do”). Each of us must find our work and do it. --Audre

Lifeguards and Angels

I have lived a long time but I have never lived through such a time of destruction, of nature, of human lives, of truth, fact, science, journalism, the rule of law. I write during a summer of colossal wildfires, of extreme heat, of human rights abuses, of attacks on history

Listening to Cassandra: Misogyny, Classical and Modern

Last weekend, the film The Odyssey was released and the Tate brothers were arrested in Florida at the behest of the British government, which seeks to extradite them to face a long list of charges. Andrew Tate is charged with "seven further counts of rape, three counts of arranging

A Million Warnings and One Huge Invitation: Climate 2026

It is like a bad dream that keeps recurring: people are drowning while we are prevented from reaching them with our rowboats and life preservers; homes are burning but someone is standing on the firehose or knocking down the ladders; there is a planetary thermostat and countless people are trying

Pod Save Patriarchy (or Whatever That Sorry Platner Spectacle Was)

For at least a decade we have been told that this and that and the other thing must be tolerated in pursuit of the elusive vote of the working class or the white working class which often means the white male working class which becomes in turn a way that

The Giantess Turns 70 (and the USA turns 250)

I wrote the essay below on the film Giant when I was a columnist at Harper's a decade ago but I thought I'd run it like a retro film revival, because I love the film and what it has to say so much, because the essay

Winners and Losers: A Hell of a Week in the US of A

There is no more one-sentence-fits-all opening in literature than Dickens's "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," and this is a review of a lot of the winning and losing over the past week or so, some of

In the Dark Times Will There Also Be Singing?

This is the one-hundredth essay at Meditations in an Emergency. Thank you everyone who has joined me here. A while back I bought a first edition of a Willa Cather novel for nothing much at a library book sale. It was Lucy Gayheart (1935), one of her less celebrated

The Golden Age of Literature Is Now: Some New Books (and Some Schadenfreude)

There's a golden age of literature – for us, not for them. That is, extraordinary work is being done in all genres of writing and the mashups inbetween them; extraordinary poets and prophets are at large in the land; magnificent books tumble forth at a rate I can'