Tag: synchronicity
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Our Art, Our Lives: On ‘Salty’ and ‘The Last Movie Stars’
When we make our art, we are also making our lives. And I’m sure that the reverse is equally true. That line is from Look & See, the beautiful documentary about the life and work of Wendell Berry. I think about it often, and I thought about it again recently as I feasted on two […]
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Four Thousand Weeks in the Midnight Library
Matt Haig’s novel The Midnight Library asks: What if you could explore every what-if of your life, specifically those that turned into regrets? How many of your other lives would actually turn out better than your real one? It’s an intriguing philosophical question that quickly turns personal for the book’s protagonist, Nora Seed, who comes […]
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Siskel & Ebert, Mark Driscoll, and the Power of Popularity
Among the podcasts in my regular rotation, there are two others I’m listening to that are both limited series, airing concurrently, and happen to share a surprising thematic overlap. One is Gene and Roger, an eight-part Spotify-exclusive series from The Ringer that serves as an oral history of Gene Siskel, Roger Ebert, and their movie […]
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Ghost Papas: Fatherhood in ‘The Patriot’ and ‘Interstellar’
I recently rewatched The Patriot for the first time in a long while. I was big into this movie as a lad, so rewatching it as a thirtysomething dad was something of an experiment to see how my adolescent tastes hold up. There’s good (John Williams’ score, Mel Gibson as likeable movie star) and bad […]
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When the past isn’t past
Alan Jacobs: If you step back from the endless flow of social media and the internet more generally, and sit down with a book from the past that appears to have absolutely nothing to do with the affairs of the moment, something curious and rather wonderful can happen. Unexpectedly and randomly — stochastically — you […]
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Reading serendipitously
In an interview, Sven Birkerts talks about how serendipity guides his reading: Any good book will, in the manner of a pool-table bumper, send you angling off to another, and that to another, on and on. The trails are not predictable, they really are serendipitous, but not in the manner of Pandora (“If you liked […]
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I heard them on the radio
How often do you listen to honest-to-goodness radio anymore? Usually I go to it only if I’m not in the mood for podcasts, audiobooks, or my own music collection. I’ll spin through my station presets to see if I get lucky, though most often I get bad songs and ads. But not the other day. I […]
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Innocents & Wonder
Synchronicity strikes again. I recently watched Anne Fontaine’s The Innocents, a new film set in post-WWII Poland focused on Mathilde, a young French Red Cross nurse compelled to help a convent of Polish nuns with a dark secret. I watched it while in the midst of Emma Donoghue’s new novel The Wonder, which is also told from the perspective of a nurse, […]
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So Runs the Man Away or (The Unexpected Virtue of Synchronicity)
The theme that has defined my 2014, I only now realize, is synchronicity. That Jungian concept (“the occurrence of two or more events that appear to be meaningfully related but not causally related”) bubbled up several times this year, especially in what I was reading, watching, or listening to concurrently. For instance: Seeing Interstellar as I […]