Marlene Dietrich’s War on Nature

by John Byron Kuhner

Marlene Dietrich's life is a parable about growing old and being famous.  Continue Reading »

5 Feb 2024

On Sleep and Dreams

by John Wilson

 I have been fascinated by sleep and dreams ever since I was a small boy in the 1950s. Continue Reading »

29 Jul 2022

Worst Cases

by John Wilson

Planning ahead with an eye toward potential catastrophe is a much-needed antidote to both despair and the presentism bedeviling much of our public discourse. Continue Reading »

4 Jun 2021

The Kominsky Method and the Hollywood Boomers

by John William Sullivan

Unlike most of what emerges from Tinseltown, a new genre of comedy focuses not on the travails of the young, but of those in their 70s. Continue Reading »

26 Nov 2018

On a Photograph of My Cousin Jean

by Catharine Savage Brosman

As lovely as a girl aged twenty-twocan be—intelligent, slim, self-possessed,and beautiful. It’s Florida; it’s newto her, like marriage. Smiling, smartly dressed, she poses, shaded by a palm, besidea terra cotta jar. The honeymoonhas just begun, the cattleya fresh, the bridestill radiant. . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Aug 2017

Gnostic Longings

by Peter J. Leithart

Complaints about aging contain an implicit affirmation of the body, rooted in the truth that our bodies are us. When our bodies ail, we ail; when they fail, we fail. We touch the world—lovers and enemies, soccer and sunsets, sonnets and sushi—only through eyes and ears and brains and nerves and hands and tongues. Continue Reading »

3 Nov 2016

Sixty-Two

by Timothy Murphy

Not fit enough to wander the wild woods or separate my wouldn’ts from my shoulds, what can I say? Not spry enough to scamper on a deck or fend a tall sloop from a leeward wreck, I steer my way. No longer lean or lithe enough to climb a groaning glacier out in Mountain Time, here I shall stay. So: . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Dec 2014

Not a Poem

by Ruth Wells

Old people can’t write poetry. Only those who think and live and feel and praise and swear and fight and love and give birth to babies can give birth to poems.  Not old people. No dear old lady living in retirement with a shawl around her shoulders, living among . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Aug 1991