Ed Simon

Morrison’s witness to language’s power to both destroy and create has been on ample display in our current season of American blood-letting. In 1993 Morrison warned of “Tongue-suicide,” which is “common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is … human.”

There are certain theological implications to the black hole. Not that it confirms any literal or conventional belief in a deity. God need not be real for divinity to be an applicable concept, for it’s good enough that the black hole is real.

Thanksgiving has been marshaled in the battle over what is the proper interpretation of the idea of America. With thousands of refugees looking for amnesty in that “last, best hope of earth,” will the better angels of our nature find room for them at the table?