popular culture

The right to erect a monument, for any cause, is an opportunity. It’s a chance to lend dignity and consequence to a public space. A monument is also an aesthetic opportunity. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, but a successful monument makes it hard to imagine its setting without it. The American Atheists monument fails on both counts.

The numbers may be low compared to global-scale disasters of recent years, but there is a wrenching poignancy to what is happening in Uttarakhand right now. Many of the forces that frame daily life in South Asia are suddenly on display like a raw wound: the wages of development and globalization, the power of the natural world, divine agency, altruism, self-interest, and the political nature of both government action and religious ritual.

Walt Whitman counseled each of us to “dismiss whatever insults your soul.” My fervent hope is that the new Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences report—a project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences that was “commissioned” or “requested” by a quartet of DC pols—will be dismissed accordingly.

I wanted to think about how we mediate the past for children—and how we tell stories about children who lived in the past. Writing about religion, memory, and children’s literature became my way of doing that.

To these guys, the idea of women working outside the home is destroying American culture. They’re saying that a society in which a majority of women support their families cannot possibly be compatible with a strong, traditional, vibrant society. Yet we need only look to the traditional Jewish culture of Eastern Europe of less than two centuries ago in order to find an example that gives the lie to conservative handwringing over women’s work.

Once you produce garbage, by your own logic we have the right to recycle what you have wasted all humanity’s energy to produce (in Man of Steel, Krypton goes to hell literally because they fracked their planet to death); you could say, then, that they turned their planet into a bomb and blew themselves up. How do we make sense of this otherwise? So I suggest Man of Steel as an exercise in the language of racism, the politics of dispossession, and the danger of too much power.

A new book on ‘only children’ adds an interesting dimension to the politics of making babies.

In the US half the books on Islam are devoted to telling you what’s wrong with it. Where is the serious literature by thoughtful Muslims engaging their faith? That may take some time, but for now, take a gander at a 30-part series on the Prophet Muhammad’s father-in-law.

Graduation time—and the living ain’t easy.

The seven of us stood in the parking lot of the office building across the street, and Joe opened the zippered cover of his three-ring binder full of painstakingly collected photographs of the old neighborhood gathered for the exhibition. As he began reading aloud an oral history from Marian Sahadi Ciacci—“A Syrian who married an Italian!”—it felt like a religious occasion, a conjuring out of almost nothing of an entire world gone by.