The original text here. Once there was a little girl who tried very hard not to be born. Her father the king and her mother the king’s wife had six children already – all sons. Together they were happy. As the boys grew and took their first steps from the school-room to the field, the king realized that they would someday turn into men. Six sons were one thing. Six men were quite another.
My mother thinks I’m going to hell. That it is a real place (though not, she would qualify, full of brimstone; her idea of hell is dark, and chaotic, and utterly without God). My grandfather, when he was in hospice care, said between labored breaths how glad he was that all of his four grandchildren had made their Profession of Faith. He said about his daughter-in-law, my aunt, “I believe she knows the Lord, but…
With The New Yorker recently opening their exhaustive archives for the summer, I thought it pertinent to create a list of my favourite The New Yorker pieces from The New Yorker the better to aid your enjoyment of The New Yorker.
ALL FALL DOWN by Susan Orlean Inside the dark, drug-fuelled world of Competitive Jenga.
FROG-MATE by Malcolm Gladwell What tadpoles can teach us about chess.
This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the…
The first time I heard about my father’s godfather was at a family dinner. We were in my grandmother’s dining room celebrating my father’s birthday. It was the usual ritual of slicing the cake with the silver triangle onto the square, flowered plates, passing each one to my grandmother to slowly scoop ice cream upon, like a queen giving her blessing. Along with that were the usual jokes about my father’s birth and therefore his…
