I recommend Robert Fay’s essay about the end of the Latin Mass — and Catholic “drama of salvation” novels — even though I strongly disagree that “the Christian faith [has] been in full cultural retreat since the 1960s.”
What Middletown Read tracks borrowing records of Muncie Public Library patrons from 1891 to 1902 and shows how library use is not a lonely act but “part of the complex story of the social nature of reading.”
My latest New York Times Magazine mini-column looks at a sandstorm — “Steinbeck-ish in its arrival,” according to a city councilman — that rolled through Lubbock, Texas last month, as the harbinger of a likely impending Southwestern Dust-Bowlification. “I expected at any moment to see a line of Model Ts coming through headed to California,” the councilman said. “It . . .
My second New York Times Mag mini-column is on the futuristic skyscraper Antoni Gaudí designed in 1908 for what is now Ground Zero. His Hotel Attraction (pictured) would be a lot more fun to watch going up outside my office window than the new glass towers are. But see Rowan Moore on the still-in-process Sagrada Familia: Is it really Gaudí?
Exciting: Poet and Silver Jews singer/songwriter/mastermind David Berman has a blog, Menthol Mountains, where he’s pondering “the phony gulp,” hooked-up verse, and other things. (Thanks, 5redpandas.)