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If you’ve made the trip to Columbus, Ohio for this year’s Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA), you’ve either been vaccinated or tested. When you’re inside the convention center, you’re wearing a mask. You’ve also observed…

Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe, by Ronald Hutton, (Yale University Press: May 2022), 256 pages. Gerald Gardner was an old man with a great tuft of white hair on his head and another on his chin.…

In “Nuisance Bear,” the bears share space with the people who’ve come to see them, walking cautiously between parked vehicles, being watched and watching back. What’s a nature program without narration? The genre relies heavily on voice-overs to bridge the…

The Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan and James McNeill Whistler, National Gallery of Art, until October 10, 2022 The partnership between Joanna Hiffernan (1839–1886) and James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) in the first decade of the painter’s career created some of…

In the late twentieth century, the American psychic Jeane Dixon, nicknamed the Seeress of Washington, won a huge following after predicting, in a 1956 magazine article, that a man resembling John F. Kennedy would be elected President four years later—and…

We are living in an age of red-carpet ubiquity. Lately, the question of who will wear what on which award show step-and-repeat has become nearly as common as the question of who will take home a trophy. (The sixty-year-old Michelle…

Of all the disturbing scenes in “Tár,” Todd Field’s movie about the downfall of a world-famous conductor, I was most haunted by a frame of the titular character laughing. Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) is driving a young cellist named Olga…

Modern people simply suffer from a lack of time, so there is little time for leisure. But what to do if you want to go out, for example, to go to the cinema, but you are constantly busy? There is…

A woman, as it turns out, is actually a very difficult thing to define. Contra savvy conservative pundits, the meaning doesn’t just evade gender studies majors at Harvard but also straight white men, middle class women, and backwoods hillbillies. And…

Under Elon Musk’s chaotic first month of ownership, Twitter has seen twin exoduses. Last Wednesday, having already slashed nearly half of his staff, Musk abruptly e-mailed remaining employees an ultimatum: either stay at the company and commit to being “hardcore,”…