I rang in my 34th birthday watching Bridesmaids with my best friend, and I really can’t think of a better form of celebration. It is a very crude movie (it opens with a graphic bad-sex scene, which is cringingly, eyes-coveringly funny and painful), hilarious and poignant, with a real generosity of spirit. None of the women are pure cartoons meant only to be laughed at. Everybody is needy and trying, in often self-defeating ways, to reach out. Both friendship and... Read more
Tim Carney: …Jenni was conceived when her mother was raped by a boyfriend as a teenager. She is a human reminder of an uncomfortable truth denied and minimized by people on all sides of the abortion issue: Rape can result in pregnancy, which means it can create innocent babies. “A lot of people like to sweep it under the carpet,” Jenni told me Wednesday. But, if commonly cited statistics are correct, hundreds of thousands of Americans walking around today were... Read more
It was sadness that gripped him far more than the fear that, if facing the truth, he had maybe a year. When poetic phrases like “eyes, look your last” become true, all you want is to stay, to hold fast. A new, fierce attachment to all of this world now pierced him. It stabbed like a deity-hurled lightning bolt, lancing him, sent from above, left him giddy and tearful. It felt like young love. —more; the earlier section of this... Read more
First, my new article: For the past 10 years I’ve volunteered at the Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center, a pro-life Christian ministry in the troubled heart of Washington, D.C. Over this decade of listening to women in crisis, talking with them, helping them find the resources they need, praying with them, hugging them, sometimes inviting them into my home when they had no safe place to go, I’ve seen shifts in the culture of poor D.C. women. My own perspective has... Read more
Fascinating little post from Leah Libresco on virtue ethics as mask-wearing. Read more
A brilliance takes up residence in flaws— a brilliance all the unchipped faces of design refuse. The wine collects its starlets at a lip’s fault, sunlight where the nicked glass angles, and affection where the eye is least correctable, where arrows of unquivered light are lodged, where someone else’s eyes have come to be concerned. —the rest Read more
Last night I watched Isle of the Dead: produced by Val Lewton, directed by Mark Robson, and starring Boris Karloff. YES PLEASE. Karloff is just terrific in whatever role directors find for him. He was phenomenal as a slimy divinity student in Five-Star Final and he’s fearsome here as a merciless Greek general. The movie is set on a remote Greek island–cue Lewtonish classical allusions–whose inhabitants are menaced by either the septicemic plague, or the vampire-like Vorvolaka. The religion/myth vs.... Read more
in which I stare at Winter Light like a Dostoyevskyan married couple staring at a spider. The comments are already interesting, and you should go make them even more so! Read more
I’m reminded of this old piece I wrote, “The Survivor’s-Guilt Guide to College.” Read more
A really beautiful Little Mermaid adaptation by Soyuzmultfilm, from 1968. Glorious animation. And a babushkafish! There are no subtitles but much of the movie is wordless, and you should at least watch until it switches from black & white to color. Read more
Eve Tushnet
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