As the pandemic rages, we are forced to acknowledge a world of beings too tiny to see. Though we’ve known since third grade science that they are there — bugs, germs, viruses — for most of us, most of the time, they are no more real than fairies or leprechauns. Suddenly, in this most scientific […]
Read More The invisible danger of Covid 19: An ordinary world made terrifyingly “other”When I was a kid, Alvin was a dog in my neighborhood with an underbite and a pushed-in snout. Mostly soft gray, but with wiry patches of whisker-like black fur sprouting up here and there, everyone agreed that this dog was ugly. Everyone, that is, except Alvin, who wandered from house to house with the […]
Read More Queer style and aesthetic mindfulness: Breaking the habit of being ourselvesAs philosophers have long noted, human beings are remarkable, in part, for being the sort of beings for whom the very fact of being matters. It’s an existentialist observation that sounds very lofty and celebratory until you consider that we are, simultaneously, driven to cover up and deny knowledge about existence, including suffering, destruction, and […]
Read More The know-nothing animal: Our costly addiction to willful ignoranceI was walking across a Menard’s parking lot a couple of months before the 2016 election when a car swerved toward me as if to run me down. It was a fortyish white guy in a white Buick with a red Trump bumper sticker. He got so close I could see the McDonald’s cup in […]
Read More When the MAGA fashion police decide you’re a faggotAlthough the U.S. government has a long history of warehousing people of color, its overt foray into large-scale concentration camps intended for desperate asylum seekers is relatively new. And the video of a Trump administration lawyer coolly offering a rational argument as to why basic humanitarian rules do not require the government to facilitate sleep, […]
Read More Soap and toothbrushes: Mundane symbols of compassion and respect
