May 19, 2025
- In defense of despair
- Columbia student Mohsen Mahdawi on being released from ICE detention
- On the ethics of buying used books (and music)
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"I was trying to stay awake, so I switched on the radio and looked for Claudia Corbett’s show on KDGL. Usually, she’s on at lunchtime, and I listen to her while I’m peeling potatoes or chopping parsley, but the show is so popular that they rebroadcast it again at ten p.m. That night, a young woman was calling in to say she had gotten married just six months ago, but she and her husband were already fighting because he wanted to move to Portland to be a nature photographer, and she wanted to stay at her job with an insurance company in Salt Lake City, and neither one of them would change their minds. 'Listen,' Claudia told her sharply, the way she does sometimes, when callers start to ramble and refuse to face the obvious, 'nobody said that marriage was easy. Marriage is work.'"
"Seeing her again now, I was ashamed that the day before I’d been so intimate with her, going so far as to tell her my secrets! On the bench, forgotten, was my book of Great Leaders: and that sight increased my shame. Angrily I opened the French door, and then finally she saw me."