Most Read from past 24 hours

“You have to be always drunk,” wrote the French poet Charles Baudelaire. “That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.” “But on what?” Baudelaire asks. With “wine, with
READ MORE
Presentism: Now there’s one ugly duckling of a word. My online dictionary defines presentism as “uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts.” To my surprise, the 40-year-old dictionary on my shelf also contains this eyesore of a word and definition. To be present,
READ MORE
Last year a Harvard Youth Poll found 51 percent of Americans ages 18-29 had felt depressed, down, or hopeless at times in the two weeks before responding to the survey. While adults might respond in similar numbers—feeling “down” covers a lot of territory—let’s take the poll at face value and assume that teens and twenty-somethings
READ MORE
“Semi-fascist.” That’s one more medallion to add to my string of honorable and not-so-honorable titles. Semi-fascism is the label President Joe Biden slapped on Donald Trump’s MAGA philosophy in a late August speech. Supporters of Trump are now apparently enemies of the state who despise the Constitution. Which means that about half of American voters
READ MORE