Wagner’s master array of borrowed, modified, and reinvented archetypes—the wanderer on a ghost ship, the savior with no name, the cursed ring, the sword in the tree, the sword reforged, the novice with unsuspected powers—lurks[…]
Young orators’ tongues are formed before their minds are set. This happened to Martin Luther King, Jr., who had to inhabit a leadership position that he was not yet fully prepared to assume, as it[…]
…the Korean Talmud, in some ways, is an inversion of the Babylonian Talmud – a radical example of “reception”. Classical rabbinic texts from late antiquity (Mishnah, Tosefta, the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds) were composed as[…]
Augustine’s tortured recognition that involuntary arousal was an inescapable presence—not only in conjugal lovemaking but also in what he calls the “very movements which it causes, to our sorrow, even in sleep, and even in[…]
We imagine the villains of history as cunning strategists, brilliant masterminds of horror. This happens because we learn about them from history books, which weave narratives that retrospectively imbue events with logic, making them seem[…]
In the ghetto narrative, a poor neighborhood falls victim to isolation; in the gentrification narrative, a poor neighborhood falls victim to invasion. These stories are not necessarily contradictory—they reflect a common conviction that the sorrows[…]
…to any who would make noise about using force to effect change, please grow up. You may have guns. Maybe you’ll buy yourself an AR-15 and learn how to shoot it. Yay. The U.S. Army[…]
A logo is not a brand. Neither are cute headlines or splashes of color. Logos and colors provide graphic continuity. They are the cover, not the book. Color says nothing about what you stand for,[…]
None of us, having achieved success in whatever realm, wants to think that it was the product of the circumstances that set us up for success, as much as it was our smarts, hard work,[…]
All history is retrospective. We’re always looking at the past through the lens of later developments. How else could we see it? We are ourselves, as subjects, among those later developments. It’s natural for us[…]