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Things are hard, so I am in the mood for sad, beautiful music. Happily, providence has sent me some. I have been listening obsessively to I Am A Bird Now, the latest from Antony and The Johnsons. Antony Hegarty’s music is a genre- (and gender-) bending amalgam of art song, doo-wop and gospel, all layered …

Have you seen the two almost-identical AP photos making the rounds, one of a young black man wading through chest-high floodwaters trailing a bag of groceries, the other of a white couple doing the same? The first photo is captioned ” A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store….” …

I come from a long line of refugees. From Adam and Eve cast out of Eden to the exodus from Egypt and forty years’ wandering in the wilderness, the story of the Jews turns on exile and the yearning for refuge. My own maternal grandparents left Russia under cover of night to escape the pogroms …

In The Golden Notebook, her masterpiece of disillusionment, Doris Lessing wrote about the dream of a fellow stalwart of the British Communist Party. The book was published half a dozen years after Nikita Khrushchev’s revelations to the 20th party congress in 1956 of Stalin’s terrible crimes. In the party worker’s fantasy, he goes to Russia, …

For the past few days, these lines from Deuteronomy 22:8 have been resounding in my head with the regularity of a heartbeat: “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet on your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone should fall from it.” A statement’s appearance …