Baron Wormser: Salvation
On Flannery O’Connor, Donald Trump, and American Violence
William D. Hartung: In Stunningly Bright Colors
Enrico Muratore Aprosio’s Cry for Common Sense and Common Humanity,
Christopher B. Daly: The New Yorker turns 100 − how a poker game pipe dream became a publishing powerhouse
A big part of the magazine’s eventual success was Ross’ genius for spotting talent and encouraging them to develop their own voices.
George Yancy: Remember What Audre Lorde Told Us — The Oppressor Doesn’t Determine What’s True
To navigate these terrible times, we need Audre’s Lorde’s audacity: Protect the public sphere. Refuse to be silenced.
Mike Schneider: Incompletely Known | Déjà vu Bob Dylan
The popularity and critical success — a not-easy-to-achieve combo — have to do not only with the singular genius of Dylan, an unknown 19-year-old bohemian who becomes the icon of an era, but also with the historical-cultural milieu in which the movie’s events — real and not — occurred.
Sydney Lea: Hush
Does it make any sense to say I heard dead silence? No matter. I’ll simply declare that I’ve never known such quiet in the sixty years I’ve roamed these woods and hills.
Hildegard von Bingen: Vision 7, The Devil
Then I saw a burning light, as large and as high as a mountain, divided at its summit as if into many tongues.
Baron Wormser: David Lynch (1946 – 2025)
In Lynch’s world, human beings are, so to speak, flammable animals whose electrical nature can be set off by a carnal gaze or by sinister forces that roam the ether and can turn one person into another with a mere zap. The zap can seem both hokey and terrifying.
Therese L. Broderick: Beautiful Uses | The Compassion of James Crews
This book’s enduring beauty and daily usefulness can cradle and help to heal our broken hearts.
Baron Wormser: The Missing Poet
Reasons abound for Republicans to not think twice or to dismiss poetry as elitist or more identity politics or whatever pejorative comes to mind. Much more important work is waiting– or so we are told.
Charles Davidson: Reflections on “Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin.” (the Movie and the Man)
Despite the film’s deficiencies, excesses, and flagrant exploitation by those willing to corrupt Bonhoeffer to their own sinister purposes, there is something to be said for the film’s implied warning about the rising tide of authoritarianism in America.
Vox Populi: The Most Popular Posts of 2024
Thank you so much for helping to make Vox Populi a success in 2024. Since our founding 10 years ago as a newsletter for anti-fracking activists in Western Pennsylvania, we’ve accumulated more than 5,000,000 visits. We now have over 20,000 daily subscribers, about 35% outside the United States.
Dennis Wilson Wise: The woman who revolutionized the fantasy genre is finally getting her due
Arthur C. Clarke called her the “most brilliant editor I ever encountered,” and Philip K. Dick said she was the “greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins.”
Barbara Hamby: Ode to the ‘Messiah’, Thai Horror Movies, and Everything I Can’t Believe
When I decide to go to hear Handel’s Messiah in London
at the composer’s parish church, my husband says
he’d rather see a Thai horror movie, so we plan to meet later
at our favorite Moroccan lair
