When I was in fifth grade my family and I moved briefly to Santa Monica to be with family during a difficult time. It was hard for everybody; least hard for me, but I missed home a lot. I was unhappy and acted badly. So for a long time I thought of “LA” as a place I hated–a place where I’d been unhappy even though a lot of people were very kind to me. And of course nobody will ever... Read more
Some personal news: Christ is risen! Holy Thursday: I avoided the Triduum services at my home parish, the Cathedral, for the reason I talked about here. (Though I was at the Easter Vigil.) Instead, with some friends I attended a Solemn Mass of the Lord’s Supper at a nearby church. It was one of many churches around the District where rapid demographic transformation (she said carefully) has left the parish with mostly-black elders and mostly-white newcomers. So the ushers were... Read more
I have been looking forward for a very long time to this adaptation of the scariest (and saddest) Stephen King novel I’ve ever read. The moment I saw the trailer, with the creepy procession of kids in animal masks and the huge smash cut to the truck roaring by, I thought, This might be good. And the new movie is good, in the exact way the old one (1989) was not good. Is that good enough? This adaptation, and especially... Read more
for America: “The Devil’s Doorway” is a found-footage film set in 1960 in a Magdalene laundry. These laundries were workhouses, initially set up for prostitutes, but were later used to indefinitely incarcerate women considered immoral for a variety of reasons, including unwed motherhood. Two priests come to the institution to investigate an anonymous letter claiming that a statue of Mary there weeps blood and that the nun in charge of the reformatory is covering up this miracle. Their investigation uncovers... Read more
I love “institutional novels”: novels whose characters whose lives are shaped, often against their will, by the institution in which they live. Monasteries, prisons, boarding schools (though not colleges–the college novel is a different beast), communes and hospitals. Institutional novels are about the attempt to form a human life in the service of one overarching purpose; they’re also, of course, about the million ways we resist this trellising of the soul. (In this sense The Canterbury Tales is an institutional... Read more
Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning directorial debut, 2017’s “Get Out,” was as much an exploration of the nature of racism as it was a suspenseful horror flick. Horror with a fairly obvious meaning can hit hard: “The Babadook” is a compelling and elegant fright fest, even once you know that the Babadook is grief. But our fears rarely come with a decoder ring. So it’s terrific to see that Peele’s latest film, the home-invasion horror “Us,” is skillful and strange, opening up... Read more
Alongside the Crucifixion, the Eucharist–and specifically the Real Presence, the literal transformation of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ–was one of the aspects of Catholicism which first drew me to the faith. I could tell you that it was because the Catholic doctrine seemed most responsive to the Gospels; I wrote a paper, back when I was the only atheist in my History of Christian Doctrine section, arguing that Jesus’ words at the Last Supper,... Read more
Hm, let’s do this in chronological order of the films’ release. That means we end with the weakest one but hey, I don’t make the rules. ( – a person who just made this rule’s opinion.) …I rented the first three of these on YouTube. Bachelor Mother: A real delight–a Depression-era romantic comedy, released 1939 and deeply marked by economic fears, in which plot contrivances mean Ginger Rogers can only keep her department-store toy counter job if she agrees to... Read more
at First Things: When I was a girl, I had a picture book, The Day the Fairies Went on Strike. This 1981 confection by Linda Briskin and Maureen FitzGerald, with charmingly ragged illustrations by Barbara Eidlitz, told a simple story of fairies overworked by their selfish bosses, the Mefirsts. They meet a little girl whose mother is on strike and decide to follow the mom’s example. They win reduced workloads so they can better meet little girls’ wishes. Perhaps under the... Read more
BD McClay writes a terrific, gripping piece: In a collection of papers published in 1966, Erwin Straus, a psychiatrist and phenomenologist, examined the ways in which human beings are defined by their ability to stand upright. A person who cannot stand upright, Straus wrote, “depends, for his survival, completely on the aid of others. Without their help, he is doomed to die.”12 But the upright posture and the struggle against gravity that it requires also infuse human life with “an... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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