Exit No Exit

In postwar New York, existentialism was sexy, debonair, chic, and anti-academic. It was either a philosophy or something resembling one, a bundle of linked ideas and assumptions, largely imported from Europe, that attracted the herd of independent minds feeding the cultural discourse on this side of the Atlantic. Advocates quoted Jean-Paul Sartre (“existence …

Read More

The Lessons of Likeness

… about concord as distrust. Theirs became a union that, for Whitman’s five remaining years, proved a therapeutic bonus. The time in Camden seemed to calm, buttress, feed the angular anti-social Eakins. How these two beloved outcasts came to first respect then even like each other remains a mystery tale itself. The affection still …

Read More

The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature

… multiple patterns holds our attention and elicits our response—especially through patterns of biological importance, like those surrounding character and event, which arouse attention and emotion and feed powerful, dedicated, evolved information-processing subroutines in the mind.
Patterns in fiction, as in life, may proliferate and obscure other patterns. They can yield rich but sometimes …

Read More

Me and Big Foot

… see him and report to one another. It’s a competition like Where’s Waldo or an Elvis sighting. He’s a local legend by now. He’s been seen several times on the riverbank, a man nearly seven feet tall with a stringer of enough fish to feed the whole county. “They were …

Read More

The Leap

… their early 30s, children had seemed an insane idea, a royal nuisance. People with children were handicapped: unable to travel, too tired to go out, in bondage to babysitters and feeding schedules. Anne had felt secretly smug. Gillian had had black circles under her eyes for six years. What was the point of all that

Read More

Love on Campus

… self-pity, passivity, and resentment. Hence his ambition and failure. And thence his lechery, for sleeping with his students is a sign not of virility but of impotence: he can only hit the easy targets; he feeds on his students’ vitality; he can’t succeed in growing up. Other symbolic emasculations abound. John Travolta …

Read More

The Short Reign of Fred Allen

… s cleverest entertainers for the better part of three decades.
Fred Allen (the stage name of Boston native John Florence Sullivan) was a product of radio’s feeder medium, vaudeville, which had been diverse and flexible enough to accommodate international stars, including Sarah Bernhardt, alongside rank amateurs such as the one Allen described as “a …

Read More

The Judge's Jokes

—corn flakes in washing machine / coon hound
—“Living Bra”? What’ll you feed it?
—“I never kissed the Blarney Stone; I only sat on it.”

My father, whose first and last names I share—John Jacob “Whitey” Barth (1894–1980), late of Cambridge, on Maryland’s lower Eastern Shore—was himself the fifth of …

Read More

Plum Creek

… DR would attend A&M; it was a given. He majored in plants—as he called the science of growing bigger, better, and more bug-resistant crops to feed the increasing numbers of livestock and people—and after graduation he became a county extension agent and worked in one rural area of Texas after another.
David …

Read More

War Weary

… the Humvee carrying him and four soldiers on patrol in Baghdad. “It became very difficult to objectively assess the role of U.S. soldiers who were housing, feeding, befriending and protecting me. After three weeks in a platoon, I came dangerously close to adopting the mindset and mission of a soldier.”
[adblock-right-01]
Herr …

Read More