Essays
1093 results
Page 39
Teaching poetry in the inner city
Waiting for the other shoe to drop
These sixth-graders knew about ducking from danger; they live on tragic turf (sorry, no table for alliterations, either). They go to school in a city whose violent crime rate in 2012 was three times the national average, a place where nearly 30 percent of the residents squat below the poverty line. And when they wrote, their poems blistered with loss.
Essays
5 minute read
Chip Kelly trades Nick Foles
Coach Machiakelly remakes culture in Philadelphia
The Nick Foles trade turned out to be the beginning of the end.
Essays
2 minute read
If Sisyphus were here, he’d keep shoveling
We are born to persevere, even when we know it won’t do much good. We keep pushing against obstacles, and there is value in that.
Essays
2 minute read
The 2015 Philadelphia Flower Show
Gone to flowers, everyone
The theme of this year’s Philadelphia Flower Show is “the movies,” although the organizers are being somewhat disingenuous in that only Disney movies are included. The Disney-only focus allows for marvelous flights of fancy but limits the emotional range, and emotional maturity, of the entries.
Essays
5 minute read
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Will the real Dark Knight please stand up?
The League of Arch Villains Who Think Batman Sucks reach a surprising conclusion at their monthly meeting.
Essays
4 minute read
Iraqi Sniper
Suppose there was somehow a viable movie industry in the shambles that is Iraq. Suppose a movie was made there called Iraqi Sniper. What would it be like?
Essays
3 minute read
Trouble in paradise
There we were, reading an 18th-century poem on a smartphone while driving an electric car past lava tubes that, two million years ago, bubbled with volcano guts. Suddenly, time felt not like a continuum, but more like a pleated fabric, the long-ago pressed hotly against the now.
Essays
6 minute read
Heidegger and the Super Bowl
Thinking football
It might be possible to argue that Patriots head coach Bill Belichick is the Heidegger of football, if anyone could actually figure out what Belichick is thinking.
Essays
5 minute read
The age of mothers
In the weeks after losing her mother, the author explores a pair of historic Philadelphia cemeteries.
Essays
5 minute read
"Justice" for Joe Paterno?
It was fair to reverse the disqualification of current players from bowl game eligibility: They played no part in the Sandusky scandal. It wasn’t fair to reverse the change in Paterno’s numbers: That was only a slap on the wrist for a powerful man who otherwise escaped punishment for the terrible things that happened on his watch.
Essays
4 minute read