Culture

Prepping for a return visit to the attractive and prospering city of Greenville, South Carolina, I grabbed the only South Carolina travel book in our library system. An entry in the Moon series, it reassured Northern visitors that Greenville “is…

I had the pleasure of visiting Siena in August, though I missed the celebrated Palio horserace that takes place in the middle of that month. Like its historic rival Florence, the city is located in Tuscany but, unlike Florence, had…

The killing of the former Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, on July 8th, sent shock waves rippling across Japan and the globe. Even after stepping down as Prime Minister, in the summer of 2020, owing to health issues, Abe…

The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus, Andrew Klavan, Zondervan, 272 pages The world is too much with us; late and soon,…

“A poem is never done,” the writer Sandra Cisneros told me in July, over dinner at La Posadita, a restaurant in San Miguel de Allende, the Mexican city where she’s lived for almost ten years. Wearing a black-and-white huipil and…

It often takes a few moments to recognize Samuel Fosso in his self-portraits. He’s a picture of otherworldly piety as the first Black Pope, stepping on a space rock as though ready to catechize the cosmos. (It’s a cheeky allusion…

During quarantine, for those of us lucky enough to be able to work remotely, home became our whole world. Restrictions have lifted, and many have been able to resume trips not just to the office but to the movie theatre,…

In Margaret Brown’s documentary “Descendant,” a man named Anderson Flen walks through the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, and wonders aloud about the people who walked there before him, people who had less freedom and fewer opportunities. He’s from Africatown, a…

Kahn said that he still doubts whether he made the correct choice—even whether there was such a thing—but he doesn’t regret it, either. Alex Kahn was raised Jewish—he celebrated his bar mitzvah and went to shul with his family a…

Often, the appeal in playing The Sims is watching humanoids navigate barely exaggerated scenarios inspired by your own life: finding a job, finding love, and, with luck, living to see old age. Major game-play additions—“expansion packs”—can propel the game ever…