There are few more universal signs of cultural prosperity than a well-stocked supermarket. At their best, they represent the widest array of what we can offer ourselves, our friends, and our neighbors. At their worst, they’re the embodiment of consumer excess, especially in the United States, as they are easily accessible primarily to people with their own transportation and money to spare. Walking down a football field length of at least a dozen aisles, tempted by everything: natural foods, fresh […]

Henry Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, is a literary excursion recounting a two-week hiking and boating trip he and his brother John took into the White Mountains of New Hampshire a decade earlier  in the late summer of 1839. In that richly symbolic work, this river represents the passage of all things in time, from individual lives to the whole histories of civilizations, while the elevated and wild region to which the brothers are […]

Writer Min Jin Lee is having a moment. Culturally speaking, that conclusion is the ultimate two-edged sword for any artist. Is she being embraced purely for her work, or is there something more crass beneath the discussion? Her 2017 novel Pachinko, embraced at the time for carefully balancing the lives of four Korean generations as they struggle and eventually prosper in Japan, is the basis of the currently streaming (since March 25th) Apple TV + series created by Soo Hugh and […]