Tag: review
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The Relient Case for MMHMM
Mmhmm is Relient K’s best album. I thought so when it was released ten years ago and I think so still today. I was in high school when it dropped, on Election Day 2004. The version of Mmhmm I listened to back then, over and over again, still lays calcified somewhere in my subconscious. So…
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The Glass Cage
To never confront the possibility of getting lost is to live in a state of perpetual dislocation. If you never have to worry about not knowing where you are, then you never have to know where you are. —Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage One time the internet went down at the library and it was like the Apocalypse.…
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Destiny of the Republic
In Assassination Vacation, one of my all-time favorite books, Sarah Vowell calls the circumstances surrounding the Garfield assassination “an opera of arrogance, a spectacle of greed, a galling, appalling epic of egomania dramatizing the lust for pure power, shameless and raw.” After reading Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic, which details said circumstances, Vowell’s characterization now almost…
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The Leftovers
As we approach Sunday’s season finale of The Leftovers, HBO’s new series about a Rapture-like occurrence and its aftermath in a small New York town, let’s consider a Gospel story: Jesus said to his disciples, “Compare me to something and tell me what I am like.” Thomas said to him, “Teacher, my mouth is utterly…
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Deep & The Divine Milieu
At one point in Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, Mason asks his father if there’s magic in the world. Probably not literal magic, his dad replies. But then he asks the boy: if you didn’t know what a whale was and someone told you there was a giant mammal that lived underwater with a heart as big…
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Calvary
The Master of death will come soon enough—and perhaps we can already hear His footsteps. There is no need to forestall His hour nor to fear it. When He enters into us to destroy, as it seems, the virtues and the forces that we have distilled with so much loving care out of the sap…
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Jane Eyre: Live Blog
I watched the 2011 film version of Jane Eyre and instantaneously documented my unvarnished initial thoughts and reactions. I’ve never read the original book, nor know anything about the story, so it’s entirely fresh to me. “What is hell?” the headmaster asks Jane. A pit of fire, she replies. But she really knew, as others…
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Notes on Shady Characters
Keith Houston’s 2013 book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks is like catnip for word nerds. It’s rife with historical trivia about the more uncommon punctuation marks that have littered language history, including the pilcrow (¶), dagger (†), and interrobang (‽). It also provides background on the symbols we…
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This Is Martin Bonner
I’ve seen a face I won’t soon forget. It’s the face of an unsure redemption, of grace on the upswing. Of counting tenuous steps as tiny miracles. This face is a freshly washed used car whose surface is clean again, but whose frame within still carries the weather and rust. It’s a face leading a…
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Boyhood
With respect to the late, great Roger Ebert, I’m taking the name of his memoir and biographical documentary and giving it instead to Richard Linklater’s new epic novel of a film, for it is Life Itself. Boyhood chronicles the young life of Mason (Ellar Coltrane), who at the film’s beginning is a six-year-old on his…
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Two Librarians Discuss ‘The Fault In Our Stars’ – Okay?
Alyssa Vincent (Twitter) and I go way back to our college days, where we were fellow English majors and worked as co-editors-in-chief of our school newspaper. When we were emailing about her contributing to the second issue of the Simba Life Quarterly, I made an allusion to The Fault In Our Stars, which elicited a strongly…
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Dorothy Day and the Noah Way
A passage early on in Paul Elie’s The Life You Save May Be Your Own popped out when I first read it and stuck with me as I watched Darren Aronofsky’s remarkable Noah. Elie’s book chronicles the intersecting lives and spiritual journeys of four influential Catholic writers: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery…
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The Word Exchange
Warning: Here be minor spoilers. I collect cool words. It started with Daniel Okrent’s Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition: words like calumny, bugbear, abstemious, and postprandial popped out as I read that great history of Prohibition a few years ago, and I wanted to remember them, so I wrote them down. I’ve done that…
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House Of Cards
As the second season of House of Cards begins Friday, it’s worth remembering that the Netflix political drama last left us with a prayer. In last season’s finale, Frank Underwood, the politician who has schemed his way through a twisted plan of revenge, enters a church, gets on his knees and looks skyward. “Every time I’ve spoken…
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Seeing In Black And White
Rod Dreher recently wrote about Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson’s comments about, essentially, how happy he believed Black Southerners were in the 1950s before the civil rights movement. To Dreher, Robertson’s comments demonstrate the power of narrative, of the stories we tell ourselves and how they affect how we see the “truth” of our own situations, even when…