by Yule Heibel

When I went downstairs this morning, it was still pitch black. There was some snow on the car, but it’s raining – just raining – heavily now. A few houses have lights on, the bright glare of a street lamp on the street below is slowly dimming it seems, or else it just appears that […]

Before bed these days I’m reading a few pages of Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae. A couple of nights ago I finished the chapter on the Italian Renaissance: Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo. I get what she’s on about with the anti-Chthonian, pro-Apollonian “western eye,” its drive to elevate the individual from out of the muck of […]

A cold front is heading our way tomorrow but especially Saturday. It’s cold today, too: white frost coats the roofs. And already the difference the insulation makes that we had blown into the home office walls last week is quite immense. It literally feels like the room has a coat on, and isn’t standing in […]

The other day I read this piece, which had been highlighted in Arts & Letters Daily, describing the rather obtuse criticism Lionel Shriver got for her Brisbane talk about “cultural appropriation.” In particular it was about this article a young Somali-Australian woman wrote in The Guardian, which detailed her trauma at having to listen to Shriver. […]