I didn’t celebrate America’s 250th birthday yesterday. How could I, with Trump still at the helm of a listing ship? Our country is so deeply fractured that I lack confidence our ship of state can ever be restored to an even keel again.
While the mid-terms loom, a new, more radical faction seems to be taking hold, offering simple remedies, under the aegis of expanded government, to complex problems that may well prove incendiary to America’s best interests.
History is being distorted—accompanied by the rise of a heated rhetoric, the past filtered through a modern lens, as if we can sanitize our heritage by consigning to oblivion our flawed heroes who nonetheless made America possible.
To contend, as some now do, that the Revolution was fought primarily to preserve slavery is a profound untruth. In 1776, Great Britain had no intention of dismantling the institution. While Royal Governor Lord Dunmore famously offered freedom to slaves who fled rebel masters to fight for the Crown, his proclamation was a cynical tactic of war, not a moral crusade; Dunmore himself owned a hundred slaves whom he exempted from his proclamation, and Britain did not outlaw slavery in its empire until 1833. The colonists revolted over representation and imperial overreach, not a defense of bondage.
Far from protecting slavery, the radical ideals unleashed by the Revolution ignited the Western world’s very first widespread abolitionist movement, a moral arc that would ultimately culminate in a bloody Civil War and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
History taught from the periphery, filtered through rigid ideology or simplified into monolithic narratives, is intrinsically dangerous. It rests on a priori assumptions and is too often promulgated with dogmatism. True understanding requires nuance, humility, and courage.
Intolerance and intimidation increasingly menace our daily life. It’s a different America from the one I grew up with—dynamic, prosperous, a nation deserving of its patriotism.
And why not?
At the end of WWII, a victorious America was the sole nuclear power. It possessed an army of 14 million, an air force of 50,000 planes, and the largest naval force in history with nearly 7,000 ships, including 99 aircraft carriers.
Yet, alone among the global empires of history, America walked away from total dominion and chose peace over subjugation.
This is the America I remember and want back again.
Every now and then, I find myself captivated by a book I stumbled upon by pure serendipity. So much of life is like that, isn’t it?—a lifelong friend suddenly made, an unexpected alpine view, a chance conversation on a plane.
I am currently reading Pam Houston’s Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the HighCountry (2019), a memoir of healing from a traumatic childhood on a remote ranch in the Colorado mountains.
Her writing is electric, sumptuous with vivid metaphor, jolting the reader into an awareness of nature’s turning wheel and inherent vulnerability. She explores the solace of animals, the loyalty of friends who show up in times of need, the sharp contrasts between urban and rural life—all of it intuitive, and all of it beautiful
It is so superbly written that, should I ever need an exit from insomnia, I would choose its audio version to placate the night, inducing deep slumber as swiftly as anesthesia on a patient lying on a surgeon’s table.
What moves me even more than her narrative of healing from life’s traumas on a remote Colorado ranch is Houston’s passionate love for our wounded earth, currently suffering the consequences of human disregard in the pursuit of profit and self-indulgence.
I am imbibing this book not just cerebrally, but emotionally, as it adumbrates my own passion for saving what remains. I cannot fathom a world bequeathed to our children and grandchildren that is absent of seals, humpback whales, polar bears, and salmon-filled streams—a world where the last untouched forests have given way to roads, lumberjacks, and pipelines.
Houston’s book carries a profound urgency, reminding us how little time remains to get our priorities right:
“Something is definitely wrong….The closer one got to the North and South poles, the more dramatic and obvious the effects of climate change. I didn’t want to live in a world without polar bears. I wasn’t sure an ocean without whales in it was any kind of ocean at all. My entire life I had watched, heartbroken, as individual pieces of wilderness that mattered to me got destroyed or developed, but I had believed, for reasons I am not clear on now (propaganda? denial? naïveté?), that the earth contained vast tracts of land humans had not pushed into. Now, I understood this thing we called technology had advanced to a point where no place on the planet was safe from our penchant for destruction. I found myself glad we had never colonized the moon.”
Houston writes here of her 2015 journey as a journalist encountering British Columbia’s Great Bear Rainforest, the largest intact temperate rainforest in the world. No roads. No lumberjacks. No liquefied natural gas pipelines.
Five months later, an agreement protecting the rainforest’s fate was reached between the provincial government, the First Nations, and the logging industry, shielding 85 percent of the forest from felling.
Yet, only a few months after that, an inattentive tugboat driver fell asleep at the helm, running his ship and its towed barge aground, releasing more than 110,000 gallons of diesel fuel into the pristine waters of the Great Bear’s Seaforth Channel.
I relish this book for its affirmation of nature’s grandeur, mystery, and moods, and for its acknowledgement that our fellow animals are possessed of unique personalities, emotions, and an astonishing intelligence. Elephants mourn their dead. Chimpanzees recognize themselves in mirrors. And yes, they can suffer—and often do, largely at human hands.
In Houston, I have found a co-conspirator on their behalf, whether the creature is a dog, a horse, a lamb, or even a chicken:
“I had been born knowing that if you held the proper measuring stick, animals would always test smarter than people, and nothing I’ve seen in my lifetime has disabused me of that notion. We may have more complicated language, opposable thumbs and this dangerous thing called reason, but any self-respecting llama or buffalo or spider knows enough not to destroy its own home.”
Houston’s book offers both joy and sorrow, and it is well worth your time. Great books endure long after their final page is turned.
As America increasingly turns its attention to politics with the midterms looming, there exist inherent dangers to guard ourselves against, the most prominent among them the ideologue who offers simple answers to complex problems, caters to popular sentiment, promises much, ignoring the consequences.
The foremost tragedies of twentieth-century history were wrought by the rise of autocrats—Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao—advocates of total government who were intolerant of dissension and bound by the collective dictum that the end justifies the means.
As the late Sir Isaiah Berlin cautioned, “All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.”
Voters today must be discriminating, wary of the “brave new worlders” who would trade the painful, magnificent burden of personal choice for the comfortable chains of an enforced, singular truth.
It had seemed, for a fleeting moment, that congressional Republicans were emerging at last from their long cocoon, appearing ready to join Democrats in calling out President Trump’s profound blunder—not only in launching a 110-day war (Operation Epic Fury) heedless of its catastrophic risks, but in his subsequent appeasement of a rogue, murderous regime.
Initial Republican scrutiny was fierce, public, and remarkably direct. Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana openly declared the deal “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” thirteen American service members dead, families crushed at the pump, only for sanctions to be lifted and the bombing to stop.
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas was even more unsparing, capturing the core absurdity of the framework by warning that “history teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is a bad idea.” For a few days, it looked as though a genuine, unified groundswell of Republican consensus had taken shape.
What sparked this rare mutiny were emerging details of the newly brokered Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), reading less like calculated diplomacy and more like a wholesale capitulation by a president eager to flee a senseless conflict.
The concessions granted to Tehran are immediate and staggering. Through instant Treasury waivers, the administration has bypassed existing sanctions, leaving Iranian freighters entirely free to ship crude oil to China, their best customer.
A fragile 60-day period of free passage through the Strait of Hormuz has begun, yet the fundamental balance of power has been upended.
While negotiators commence talks on the vital issue of nuclear acquisition, the regime’s potent, increasingly long-range ballistic missile and drone capabilities receive no mention in the text. Neither do its beleaguered citizens—thousands of whom were killed by rooftop snipers last January, with many more imprisoned, including a Nobel Peace Prize winner, as state executions continue unabated.
Furthermore, the agreement features a deeply controversial provision to open the gates for a $300 billion reconstruction and development mechanism, effectively enriching the coffers of a regime that was bordering on total economic collapse.
Trump loudly protests that the windfall is conditional on Tehran’s behavior, promising that if they prove stubborn about their uranium stockpile, the U.S. will simply recommence its bombing. It is a hollow gamble, built on the unconscionable premise of offering a massive financial lifeline to a theocratic dictatorship.
Democrats recognize the MOU for exactly what it is: a desperate attempt by a frightened president, booed at public appearances, to walk away from a historic blunder.
They point out that trading away massive economic leverage upfront just to buy a 60-day dialogue leaves the United States in a vastly inferior strategic position than it occupied before the conflict began, back when Iran’s uranium enrichment was still capped.
For a brief window, initial Republican scrutiny gave teeth to a potential congressional resistance. Lawmakers began drafting legislation to strip the Executive Branch’s ability to issue these oil waivers, a move that would collapse the $300 billion mechanism.
Yet the glaring obstacle remains—the presidential veto. To truly stop the administration, Congress would require a two-thirds supermajority in both chambers—a hill that has suddenly become far too steep to climb.
The resistance effectively crumbled when Senator Lindsey Graham, who had previous dubbed the fund “a Marshall Plan with the Nazis still in charge,” executed his sharp turnabout. Initially vehemently opposed, the leading hawk offered a tepid endorsement of the agreement after a single closed-door briefing. Vice President JD Vance instantly weaponized Graham’s reversal, using it during a blunt White House press conference to excoriate a deeply disillusioned Israel, warning their cabinet to fall in line or risk losing their last major ally.
Once again, Trump’s immense gravitational pull has had its way, dampening conservative scrutiny and fracturing any hope of a unified legislative front.
The emperor wears no clothes, yet Capitol Hill has folded. We are left watching a presidency trade away hard-won geopolitical leverage for a temporary reprieve, like a used car salesman successfully selling the country a piece of junk.
I dare you to look at photographs of what Trump has done to the once pristine White House lawn—yesterday’s campus for a public UFC cage-match on the occasion of his turning eighty.
Meanwhile, the skeletal steel grids of his coveted ballroom, replacing the former historical East Wing, now surface above ground as he rushes to complete the project before the courts ultimately render their final verdict. The next project: his touted arch.
This morning he left the country for the annual G7 summit in Evian, France, leaving behind a polarized nation in supreme danger as he walks away from a senseless war that ultimately disrupted the economic welfare of many nations, including our own, achieving minimal returns.
Topping things off, Trump thanked Putin, whom he called before his departure like a child seeking parental approval, allegedly—with Xi Jinping as well for helping secure the present settlement by “not interfering.”
No thanks whatever for the Omani, Qatari, and Pakistani intermediaries who worked feverishly to secure this agreement. Rest assured, he’ll be reviving his campaign for the Nobel Prize.
In the negotiated ceasefire with Iran, the primary issue of Iran’s close proximity to creating a nuclear bomb has been deferred; its growing ballistic prowess, conceivably capable of striking the U.S. heartland, receives no mention.
Nevertheless, the effective U.S. blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has been immediately lifted, with billions in held Iranian assets and the undoing of sanctions to follow shortly. Trump, in keeping with his mercantile lusts, foresees an economic jackpot in a close partnership with Iran.
As for the fate of millions of repressed Iranians—7,000 murdered just last January, thousands still imprisoned, hangings continuing—Trump is indifferent to their suffering, on vivid display in this dubious agreement.
There is every likelihood that Iran will continue to violate any agreement. They are already contradicting his claims of a “toll-free” passage, proving they will use the threat of closure of the Hormuz waterway to gain their ends. What then?
As for Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah, suspending the lobbing of Iranian-supplied missiles into Israel—that’s just not going to happen.
In truth, this dubious agreement paves the way for a chilling reality the media has completely failed to grasp: a nuclear domino effect across the Middle East.
If a transactional, unreliable America signals it will tolerate a near-nuclear Iran for the sake of mercantile optics, do we honestly believe Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates will merely stand by? We are staring down the barrel of a terrifying regional arms race, triggered by the collapse of Western deterrence.
Worse still is the immediate, existential scenario that should send goosebumps up your torso. It is a poorly kept secret that an isolated, cornered Israel is already a potent nuclear power, with an estimated arsenal of up to 90 plutonium warheads.
Sidelined from the ceasefire negotiations and facing what it perceives as an absolute threat of extinction, what stops Israel from deciding that a preemptive first strike on a dangerous Iran is its only path to survival?
By washing his hands of the conflict, Trump hasn’t created peace; he has backed a nuclear-armed ally into a corner where dropping the Big One becomes a logical choice.
As for the G7, Macron altered the starting date to accommodate Sunday’s bash. Musn’t upset the volatile president.
European leaders must now wade through the wreckage of his current unilateralism. Blinded previously by his February bombing of Iran, what hidden concessions lie buried?
In sum, we have an incompetent president devoid of any defined, consistent policy, ruthless to his critics, including members of his own party. Narcissistic, pecuniary, dictatorial, and omnivorously menacing, he is our Caesar.
His Brutus lies in a looming midterms Democratic sweep in both chambers, reducing his regime to a lame-duck presidency.
Still, the idea he’s in the White House for another two years—I don’t want to think about it!
If you ask me to name my favorite American poet, and there are many extraordinary ones to choose from, I will unabashedly reply: Emily Dickinson.
Her recurring themes of deity, nature, and mortality have always held me captive. I grew up in an intensely Christian household, only to rebel later in life as the problem of evil weighed heavily on my mind. Dickinson was herself a rebel. In a time of vestigial Puritanism, she chose to stay home from church and frequently questioned God’s way of doing things.
Like her, I am intimately aware of death’s proximity and its universal scythe. As for her ardent love for nature—count me in.
Above all, I admire her poetry for its enigmatic essence, her finest poems lending themselves to myriad readings and leaving behind a lingering residue.
Like the Bible studies of my youth, her work invites group commentary. Like her elusive life, we probe the lines and never exhaust them.
Perhaps her most universally beloved poem is “Hope is the thing with feathers.” Unlike the vast majority of her 1,776 poems, this one resides in an apparent simplicity, which likely explains its enduring popularity:
Hope is the thing with feathers – That perches in the soul – And sings the tune without the words – And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard – And sore must be the storm – That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land – And on the strangest Sea – Yet – never – in Extremity, It asked a crumb – of me.
Yet, the poem has its detractors. Some critics contend that its smooth surface, aside from the initial personification of hope as a bird, lacks the integrity of a truly well-crafted poem.
They argue that it contains no irony, no paradox, and no resonant dictional elements. In its hymnal quatrains, they hear a sing-song quality that invites parody. They claim it lacks metrical subtlety.
They ask: if the bird sings a song without words, shouldn’t a poem proffering hope actually articulate its basis?
The second stanza, however, belies the poem’s seeming simplicity, introducing an undermining threat to its optimism: “And sore must be the storm / That could abash the little bird.” In short, the stanza introduces the possibility of a duress so severe that even hope cannot transcend it. “Abash” connotes embarrassment, or even shame for having entertained hope in the first place, while “little bird” underscores an acute vulnerability.
I actually admire this stanza precisely for its ambiguity. Are there life interventions that—no matter what we oppose against them, like sandbags piled against a rising river, cannot avail?
Dickinson does not answer, nor should she. The stanza deserves praise for its integrity. Writing in a cultural context that demanded a definitive conversion experience, Dickinson may suggest that hope—or better yet, faith, does not always prevail.
The eminent late critic Helen Vendler, about whom I recently posted (Vendler ), contends that the poem’s seeming simplicity conceals an underlying riddle. The text never once specifies the word “bird”; we are left to discover it ourselves.
While hope carries a massive theological history, the poet bypasses complication with a quotidian analogy drawn from nature. St. Paul famously wrote of the three virtues that abide—or rather, transcend: faith, hope, and love. Dickinson’s analogy is demonstrative of this. Replete in New Testament overtones, this hope “endures all things,” despite life’s vicissitudes of “storm” and “gale.”
It continues, asking for nothing—not a single “crumb.” It does not need to be fed; it requires no logical rationale.
Returning to that challenging second stanza, perhaps the speaker is not acquiescing to the idea that hope will fail under trial. Instead, she may be conjecturing about what unthinkable life tribunal would be required to extinguish it.
The ambiguity remains beautifully unresolved. Is Dickinson admiring the unshakeable faith of her fellow townsfolk—a faith to which she herself could not subscribe? I have a cousin whose faith has remained utterly unaltered, no matter the circumstance, from the earliest days I have known her.
If we exclude Dickinson herself from the poem’s persona, as the most valuable exegesis does, a deeper problematic emerges: is this a poem of distant admiration or personal testimony? The closing words, “of me,” pull us back and forth between a deeply personal confession and the observations of a detached admirer.
Vendler is entirely right about the riddle here that conceals a depth wrought of subtle artistry. Even Dickinson’s dashes perform a vital cinematic role—acting like a panning camera that takes in each angle separately, before finally folding the scene into a consummate plenitude.
Here I am, back again, recommending another book. I think it comes down to the social creatures we are at heart. Those best portions of our memories—of travel, a good meal, an unexpected kindness—are never isolated; they are more fulfilling when shared.
I’ve been reading Roger Rosenblatt’s Rules for Aging. Its sequel, More Rules forAging, comes out June 2.
Originally published a quarter-century ago, this book is a slim, deceptively simple survival manual for the twilight of life. Rather than offering earnest scientific breakthroughs or dense psychological theories on growing older, Rosenblatt delivers fifty-eight bite-sized, counterintuitive gems of wisdom rooted in a liberating truth: most of the little things we agonize over simply do not matter.
Armed with a rueful, tongue-in-cheek irony, he instructs us to stop defending our character, to run when someone says “we must do this again,” and to realize that nobody is thinking about us anyway.
Rosenblatt’s crystalline writing is breathtaking, the sagacity drawn from a vast repertoire of experience, a way of saying things that startles. Rhythmic in cadence, exhibiting sustained, aphoristic eloquence, it’s a book you’ll want to read, pen in hand.
A learned man—Harvard Ph.D., essay writer extraordinaire, journalist, playwright, and author of more than twenty books—he’s your Renaissance man. In his spare time, he is an accomplished jazz pianist who plays by ear.
Reading Rosenblatt feels as though he’s sitting at a table across from you in a quiet café, conversing like a friend you’ve known all your life and care deeply about. He makes you think, distilling options, engaging your interior life.
With grace, he helps you accept your griefs and regrets, revise your hopes, and embrace aging and ending.
A famed memoirist, he shuns nostalgia, exemplifying the sanctity of life’s daily rituals, whether making toast for a grandchild or paddling a kayak on a foggy morning.
There’s a sadness in finishing anything Rosenblatt writes—his sheer ability to extract wisdom from close observation reveals truths we too often miss. He lingers like the aftermath of a fine wine.
He once wrote of the writer’s calling, words that capture his entire spirit:
“What are we here for? We are here to write our way into the hearts of total strangers… If a piece of writing does not touch, alter, or shake the human heart, it is nothing. It is a beautifully constructed house with no one living inside” (UnlessIt Moves the Heart).
Few twentieth-century writers combine sensual brilliance, personal scandal, and literary influence as completely as the French novelist Colette (1873-1954). Revered in France as one of the great stylists of modern prose, she remains comparatively underread in America. Her life was marked by artistic triumph, erotic independence, moral ambiguity, and deep contradiction, qualities inseparable from the extraordinary vitality of her work.
I hadn’t encountered Colette until I came across reprints of several of her best-known works in the New York Review of Books, including Chéri and The Pure andthe Impure. Curious, I decided to begin at the beginning with Claudine at School, the first of her semi-autobiographical Claudine novels, featuring the rebellious schoolgirl whose wit, sensuality, and independence challenged conventional notions of womanhood as passive, domestic, and sexually muted.
The Claudine novels emerged from one of the most exploitative literary marriages of the era. Colette’s husband, the flamboyant Parisian critic and entrepreneur Willy, recognized her talent and pressured her into writing the series, which was initially published entirely under his own name. The books became enormously successful, while Colette remained publicly overshadowed. Her eventual break from Willy marked not only a personal emancipation but the beginning of her emergence as an independent literary figure.
After reading Claudine at School, I turned to Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman, a massive and meticulous biography produced from nearly a decade of research in French archives and sources.
Thurman had previously written Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1983 and later helped inspire the Academy Award-winning film Out of Africa. She was co-producer.
Her Colette biography became a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, while France honored her with the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2016. She has also been one of the longtime staff writers of The New Yorker.
Yet I suspect many Americans remain only vaguely aware of Colette, even if they have seen Gigi, Vincente Minnelli’s celebrated adaptation of her 1944 novella.
In France, however, Colette long ago entered the cultural canon, the first female president of the prestigious Académie Goncourt, and remains a central figure in the French literary curriculum. Her Claudine novels, Chéri, and Gigi continue to be widely read.
Among her admirers were some of the century’s most distinguished literary figures: Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and even Jean-Paul Sartre. William Faulkner reportedly kept her photograph on his writing desk, a tribute from one master stylist to another.
Upon her death in 1954, she became the first French woman granted a state funeral, though the Catholic Church denied her religious burial because of her divorces and unconventional private life.
Colette’s writings eventually filled more than eighty volumes: novels, memoirs, journalism, literary criticism, essays on theatre, fashion, cuisine, and animals. During the First World War, she even worked as a war correspondent, visiting battlefields and interviewing soldiers.
Yet one finds little overt political or philosophical argument in her work. What distinguishes Colette is her total immersion in the senses. She does not merely describe experience; she inhabits it, merging the physical world with psychological perception.
One feels physically present in her prose: the ripening of a peach, the texture of a cat’s fur, the shifting power between lovers, the ache of aging, the fierce necessity of independence.
Her evocations of her native Burgundy possess extraordinary sensory delicacy:
“Je redescendais… Le jardin frissonnait encore, les roses étaient froides. J’attendais que le premier rayon de soleil touchât le mur, et alors l’odeur du buis montait comme une prière. Tout était bleu, argenté et nacré. C’était un monde où la rosée n’était pas encore de l’eau, mais une sorte de lait céleste qui adoucissait le monde avant que le jaune cruel du jour ne commence à le brûler.”
Translation:
“I would go down into the garden… The garden was still shivering, the roses were cold. I would wait for the first ray of sun to touch the wall, and then the scent of the boxwood would rise like a prayer. Everything was blue, silver, and nacreous. It was a world where the dew was not yet water, but a kind of celestial milk that softened the world before the harsh yellow of the day began to burn it away.”
She was equally perceptive about aging and female self-awareness:
“Elle regarda son reflet — le cou qui commençait à perdre sa tension, le fin réseau de rides autour des yeux qu’aucune poudre ne pouvait vraiment bannir. Elle ne pleura pas ; elle étudia sa ruine comme un général pourrait étudier la carte d’un territoire perdu. Il y avait une magnificence dans cette défaite. Elle se rendait compte qu’être une femme, c’était être une série de peaux, muées l’une après l’autre, jusqu’à ce qu’enfin, on ne reste qu’avec les os de son propre caractère, qui sont, après tout, les seules choses qui durent vraiment.”
Translation:
“She looked at her reflection—the neck that was beginning to lose its tension, the fine web of lines around the eyes that no amount of powder could truly banish. She did not weep; she studied her ruin as a general might study a map of a lost territory. There was a magnificence in this defeat. She realized that to be a woman was to be a series of skins, shed one after the other, until finally one is left with only the bones of one’s own character, which are, after all, the only things that truly endure.”
She also possessed an uncanny sensitivity toward animals, especially cats:
“Elle restait là, ombre gris-argent, ses yeux comme deux raisins translucides. Elle ne se contentait pas de regarder ; elle humait la chambre. Ses oreilles bougeaient comme de petits radars indépendants, captant le bruit d’une aile de phalène ou le tassement lointain de la maison. Dans son immobilité, il y avait une concentration terrible et belle — l’orgueil d’une créature qui s’appartient tout entière et ne doit aucune explication au monde.”
Translation:
“She lay there, a silver-grey shadow, her eyes like two translucent grapes. She did not merely watch; she inhaled the room. Her ears moved like small, independent radars, catching the sound of a moth’s wing or the distant settling of the house. In her stillness there was a terrible, beautiful concentration—the pride of a creature that belongs entirely to itself and owes no explanation to the world.”
Colette’s private life, however, remains controversial. Her relationships were often transgressive; she had a strained relationship with her daughter, engaged in an affair with her teenage stepson, and continued publishing in journals associated with Vichy France during the Nazi occupation.
Thurman describes Colette’s maternal style as one of “ruthless detachment.” Much of the child-rearing was delegated to a nanny. Mother and daughter frequently quarreled. At one point, returning from boarding school, her daughter reportedly remarked that she wished they were Jewish because Jewish parents seemed more emotionally involved with their children.
Thurman suggests that Colette regarded motherhood as an intrusion upon the artistic life—a conflict that has shadowed many women writers navigating the competing demands of creativity, erotic freedom, and domestic expectation.
Her conduct during the Nazi occupation remains morally ambiguous. Although she used her connections to secure the release of her Jewish husband from internment, she nevertheless continued publishing under the Vichy regime, actions critics still debate. Thurman offers a pragmatic possibility: survival.
In many respects, Colette embodied contradiction, shaped by a conservative provincial upbringing while seeking freedoms historically reserved for men.
Though later embraced by many feminists as a symbol of female independence, Colette often denounced feminism, once remarking that women “deserved the whip and the harem.” In a 1927 interview with Walter Benjamin, she suggested that women wielding power could become “worse than men.” Bisexual and involved in numerous relationships with women, she nevertheless disapproved of her own daughter’s lesbianism, perhaps knowing the difficulties of gay life, Thurman suggests.
And yet, despite these contradictions, Colette helped redefine what modern womanhood could be. She fashioned a public life of artistic independence, sexual autonomy, and professional achievement at a time when few such paths existed openly for women.
French culture has often shown a greater willingness than Anglo-American culture to celebrate women who combine sensual freedom with intellectual authority, as seen in figures such as George Sand and Simone de Beauvoir. Colette belongs within that lineage, though she remains more elusive, less ideological, and ultimately more instinctive than either.
Thurman’s biography succeeds precisely because it resists simplification. She neither canonizes nor condemns Colette, but instead reveals a woman of immense artistic gifts, profound appetites, emotional blind spots, courage, vanity, discipline, selfishness, and brilliance.
Above all, Colette endures because of the precision and sensual richness of her prose. Few writers have rendered nature, animals, desire, aging, and the textures of ordinary experience with such tactile immediacy and lyrical control. Whatever her personal failings, her writing continues to justify the devotion of her readers and her enduring place in French literature.
I’ve finished my clustered reading of Wendell Berry with his Port William novel, Hannah Coulter, and feel I know him now as an adamant lover of the old ways: the community of belonging; simpler living and inherited traditions; the sanctity of the family farm; nature’s cyclic wheel, ushering change and mortality’s inevitable visit; the enduring power of love to redeem life’s frequent anguish.
Reading Wendell Berry has made me more mindful of what truly matters and, like him, I mourn the passing of a better way of life—less angry, more humane, sustaining in the daily beneficence of the familiar and the abiding.
I am not partisan when it comes to politics. I support those whom I believe best represent the interests of our country and its democratic institutions.
Unfortunately, as many of us recognize, we are now in imminent danger under an obviously incompetent, self-centered, reactionary president whose conduct increasingly places personal interests above national stability and global responsibility.
Not only has he launched an unnecessary and destabilizing conflict, he now appears willing to offer Iran terms that verge on appeasement in his haste to bring the crisis to an end—without meaningful guarantees regarding nuclear enrichment, missile delivery systems, or Tehran’s support for terrorist proxies throughout the region.
This is a pariah regime that brutalizes its own people under the cloak of religion, yet the administration’s posture suggests geopolitical calculation rather than principled strategy, particularly with China looming in the background ahead of his upcoming visit there.
Trump has long displayed an affinity for authoritarian leaders such as Putin and Xi Jinping, often showing greater respect for strongmen abroad than for democratic allies at home.
Meanwhile, climate change is ignored, Ukraine is increasingly abandoned, FEMA and Medicaid are weakened, violence spreads across international shipping lanes, and the economy shows growing signs of strain. The list is long, and the cumulative effect is profound national instability.
Midterm elections are still six months away, while this presidency has another two and a half years remaining. Congress, despite its constitutional responsibilities, appears unwilling to act.
The ship of state is listing badly, and unless the country changes course, this president may take us all down with him.
Brimmings: up from the well 