The Barbershop

Cleaning an Empty Home

There is not a lot of time for sentimentality when you’re in the final week of madly preparing to list your empty, but very much “lived-in,” house

Places That Remember Themselves: The Erosion of Memory in an Unmoored...

There are still places that remember themselves. Whose inhabitants know them intimately and love them deeply.

It Wouldn’t Be Lent Without a Bar Jester Chronicle

anyone sharing my Germanic inclinations—pecca fortitor!—is likely to embark upon the challenge.

Learn This Lesson from the Fig Tree

He seems pleased that he’s protected me and mine. Or maybe ours.

Writing Exile and Reading Homeward

Here, then, is my homecoming of the imagination: to hold the past bright in memory, and to love also the saplings and the weeds of my exile.

In Praise of the Inefficient

This year I’m renewing my commitment to the sentence.

The Maps of Our Lives Point Homeward

Older and wiser, I have long learned that for all the times I wanted to visit far-away places, there is no place like home.

Reflection in a Glass Wall

The reflection looked like a vintage motion picture, only without those stilted movements.

The AI Invasion: For Humans, It’s Becoming Harder to Write

No question about it: For writers like me, who would like nothing more than to do our own writing and thinking with dignity and intellectual honesty, it’s becoming harder to write—at least on a computer.

Harr’ today, gone tomorrow

However, the widespread association of these events with the closing of the Hotel Harrington has overshadowed the preceding history of the hotel