Ars Est Mendacium

Photos by the author, Antietam National Battlefield , December 2025. You don’t expect to find yourself in a line of cars that feels like a vigil. Yet that’s how the evening began: creeping westbound along Route 34 , heaters humming, everyone tucked into their own little pocket of warmth while the December air hardened outside. Cars were already parked along the shoulder, neatly arranged as if part of the ritual. No chatter. No horns. Just a silent procession of headlights, each one pointed toward a field that has known more darkness than most landscapes in this country ever will. We waited along that stretch with the kind of patience people usually reserve for chapels. The radio stayed off. No one around us cracked their windows. We watched the condensation collect at the corners of the glass. At the same time, a YouTube video droned softly from a phone, the Threads of the National Tapestry episode titled “Sheer Unadulterated Violence.” An unflinching reminder of what happened here, n...

I came to  Les Misérables  late enough that it felt almost embarrassing to admit it. By the time I finally saw the show, most people I knew had long since chosen their favorite Valjean , sworn allegiance to one particular recording, and could quote the barricade scenes with a kind of devotional fluency. I didn’t have that history. I missed the original-cast waves, the Broadway revival discourse , and the amateur-production debates over keys and cuts. My first encounter with  On My Own  wasn’t theatrical at all. It was on  Dawson’s Creek ,  of all places, dropped into a moment engineered for maximum adolescent ache. There was no attempt to fold the song into its original context; the show used it the way teen dramas so often did back then, as a pressure valve for emotions the characters weren’t mature enough to articulate. And because the scene played it straight, without winking or hedging, the song hit me before I understood anything about the world it cam...

Somewhere between the black squares and the empty ones, Anna Shechtman found a structure she needed long before she understood why.  The Riddles of the Sphinx  begins with that recognition, tentative at first, then sharp, as she looks back at the grids she built as a teenager and sees not a hobby, but a blueprint for how she learned to manage a self she feared might collapse. The book presents itself as a history of crosswords, a memoir, a feminist inquiry . What it actually becomes is a story about control, language, and the fragile balance between the order we seek and the order that begins to seek us. Shechtman started constructing puzzles at fifteen. Most people chalk that up to precocity, but she treats it as something more pointed: an early instinct to retreat into systems where rules never shifted, and logic could be trusted. She was nineteen when  The New York Times  accepted her first puzzle, a milestone that should have felt like an arrival but instead dee...

Some paintings don’t announce themselves. They don’t lean on spectacle or narrative. They simply wait for you to settle into their rhythm, and once you are quiet enough, they begin speaking in a way you didn’t expect. Edwin Lord Weeks ’  The Pearl Mosque, Agra ,  is like that. It doesn’t insist on awe. It sits in the corner of your vision, the way memory does, patient and ready. Only when you give it time does the thing sharpen, light on marble, cloth catching in warm air, the slight bend of a man’s spine as he lowers himself toward the water. The temptation is to describe it as a study, because it led to the 1889 Salon gold-medal canvas ,  The Hour of Prayer at the Pearl Mosque, Agra . But that misreads what Weeks was doing. This smaller painting is a complete thought in its own right, painted partly on the mosque grounds during his 1886–87 journey and finished years later in Paris. It’s the kind of piece where you sense the bridge between observation and comprehension. ...

I’ve always found that certain films don’t meet you where you expect them to. They don’t arrive in a blaze of brilliance or flatten you with virtuoso performances. Instead, they come in quietly, almost cautiously, and then, long after the credits, something in them keeps working its way through your thinking.  Glory  is one of those films. You can admire it, critique it, feel its seams and its missteps, and still recognize that it carries a truth heavier than its imperfections. It’s rare for a film to be both deeply flawed and deeply necessary, but  Glory  never pretends to be anything else. It moves with the gravity of a story that has waited too long to be told, and, like many long-delayed truths, it’s messy, conflicted, uneven, yet somehow carried by a moral force that steadies everything around it. When I first saw  Glory , I knew the outline of the 54th Massachusetts the way many Americans do, a few paragraphs from a textbook, maybe a museum plaque read on...

What struck me first wasn’t the food, though it was solid and unfussy in the way a good kitchen should be. It was the sound. You can hear it before you get through the door: a K-pop track leaking into the parking lot, bright and insistent, the kind of mix built for choreography rather than contemplation. It’s the sort of thing you expect in Seoul, New York, or Los Angeles, not in a college town on the Eastern Shore. Yet there it was, pulsing through a Korean BBQ and sushi bar a block from Salisbury University, announcing itself without apology. The inside feels like someone spliced together a grill house, a toy museum, and a neon-lit bunker from a music video. Warm lights run across cinderblocks. A giant figure sits with its face in its hands. Collectible vinyl characters march across shelves. A cat-faced robot glides across the floor, blinking its little digital expressions like it’s waiting for stage directions. Screens loop K-pop performances in high definition: synchronized bodies,...