Category: Essays

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Why is Baseball the Most Literary of Sports?

The World Series is here. Even though it’s the (ugh) Braves vs. the (ugh) Astros, it’s still time to put on a ballcap, break out of a box of Cracker Jack, and head on out to the old ballgame… or least stream one online. Baseball has been known as America’s “national pastime” since the 1850s. While the sport may have been surpassed by football in the TV ratings, there’s still something about wooden bats, leather gloves, and grass-and-dirt diamonds that feels distinctly American. And distinctly literary. Read more

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This was the worst slaughter of Native Americans in US history. Few remember it.

The Bear River Massacre of 1863 near what’s now Preston, Idaho, left roughly 350 members of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation dead, making it the bloodiest — and most deadly — slaying of Native Americans by the U.S. military, according to historians and tribal leaders. The Indians were slain after soldiers came into a valley where they were camping for the winter and attacked, leaving roughly 90 women and children among the dead. Read more

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What Has One Eye and 1,200 Heads? An Old English Riddle, That’s What!

Riddles are at the heart of language. The Old English verb raedan lies at the root of “to read” and “to riddle”: To read is to riddle, to riddle is to read. What makes the riddle so special and weird as a form — and so like the crossword — is its ability to be at once highbrow and lowbrow. Riddles represent the whole of Anglo-Saxon life. These short pieces range about as widely as possible in tone and form, from ribald cracks to grammar lessons to ornate religious puzzles by the archbishop of Canterbury. Read more

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The worldview-changing drugs poised to go mainstream

In the last 10 years, psychedelic drugs like LSD, magic mushrooms, DMT, a host of “plant medicines” – including ayahuasca, iboga, salvia, peyote – and related compounds like MDMA and ketamine have begun to lose much of their 1960s-driven stigma. Promising clinical trials suggest that psychedelics may prove game-changing treatments for depression, PTSD and addiction. Read more

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Is the Tractatus more a work of poetry than philosophy?

“Philosophy,” Wittgenstein argued in the posthumously published Culture and Value, “ought really to be written only as poetic composition.” In keeping with its author’s sentiment, I’d claim that the Tractatus is less the greatest philosophical work of the 20th century than it is one of the most immaculate volumes of modernist poetry written in the past hundred years. Read more

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