Never have I felt so much a street urchin, face blackened by coal smoke, shoes torn at the toes, fingers poking through the gloves, crouched in the shadows and hidden somewhere I wasn't supposed to be while observing people stratospherically above my station as I was watching Phantom Thread. What a sumptuous film. Elegant without being opulent. ( Read more... )

The collection plate makes its way around, across each row, snaking its way to the back, down the bridge, then reverses its course to land back in the hands of the Treasurer and every Saturday since I've been back, somebody has folded up a dollar bill into the tiniest origami I ever saw, and frustrated, dt-ridden fingers fumble to take the thing ( Read more... )

I learned today, after having run into the Director of the Mass Incarceration Clinic I participated in last semester, that the client whose habeas case I'd worked on had been released pending appeal on Wednesday. He'd been in prison on a wrongful conviction for 18 years. His case and our work on it is briefly outlined hereI'd had other reasons for ( Read more... )

Somehow, I managed to spent the entire weekend in the exclusive company of friends of Bill's. A rendezvous with a new friend in East Flatbush, then, today, ambushing an old friend and buddy from New Haven, who had brought some of his network with him and who corralled me into a raucous, expansive dinner afterwards. In the middle of all of that, ( Read more... )

One of the books I'm reading now (in the wake of recent crisis, swiftly becoming a Bible of sorts) just cited William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. I'm nearing the end of Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country. I think I know what's next in my queue ( Read more... )