The Desk
These were places where I could imagine anything, be anybody. Space travel was new, fresh, a laboratory of possibility.
A Stacked Deck
What makes someone a likely Substack star is an ability to cultivate one-way, parasocial relationships with readers.
All Eyes on Me
Sometimes irony is a painful awareness of our own absurdity.
Wordsworth and the Paradox of Self-Writing
Posted on June 10, 2021
Image: Lake District, England. Via Wikimedia Commons.
When I give myself over to the self-writers I love most, I am transformed.
Let Us Now Praise the Periodical Cicadas
The pulsating song of billions of seventeen-year cicadas.
More than a Matter of Taste
by
Joshua Hren
Posted on June 2, 2021
Image: Veduta interna della Basilica di S. Pietro in Vaticano, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778), National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Henry James’s fiction shows how aesthetic misjudgments can be connected to moral vice.