Writings

Michael Schmidt always looked at the world uncompromisingly, painfully, even brutally. In his final book, a restless mind finds some measure of peace, confident in its status as a mind,...

Interesting photographs typically raise more questions than they answer. And sometimes those questions are utterly unanswerable – not because they are murky issues of opinion or interpretation, but rather because...

When I first saw some pictures from Nicholas Nixon’s “The Brown Sisters” – probably almost 20 years ago – I dismissed the collective as a gimmick. I thought just about...

The photographer John Myers once said: “The world is not beautiful – it is there.” The part of me that took a Zen Buddhism class back in college – and...

Last summer, a concert by The National totally recontextualized the songs on the band's latest record, and made me hear the music in a new way. I got to wondering...

The World Cup is boring. Novels are boring. Baseball is mostly boring. Anything that's not a constant highlight reel is boring.  So let us now praise these and many other...

“Whitman has the photographer’s eye, but no camera,” says Wright Morris in his essay “In Our Image.” The (vastly vastly underappreciated, in my humble opinion) singer-songwriter Victoria Williams has the...

“What we, or at any rate I, refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued...