Ars Est Mendacium

I don’t usually write about children’s books.  They tend to live in a separate shelf of the mind, simpler, lighter, meant to teach lessons rather than provoke questions.  But every so often, one crosses that invisible line between moral instruction and moral imagination , and it’s worth pausing for.   Maria McSwigan ’s  Snow Treasure , first published in 1942, is one of those rare books.  It may be written for children, but it was built for a moment when even adults needed to believe in something pure.  If you have children or grandchildren who are old enough to ask what courage really looks like, this is a story worth handing them. It begins, like all enduring myths, in the quiet of winter.    In a small Norwegian village under Nazi occupation, children sled down snowy hills with laughter on their lips and gold hidden beneath their blankets.    The treasure is their country’s fortune, entrusted to their small h...

There’s a particular hush that settles over a gallery when people stand in front of a Pollock. You can feel it, the reverence, the readiness to be impressed. The hush isn’t awe so much as expectation. The viewer is meant to feel something important, even if they don’t know what that something is.  Number 15, 1948 , housed quietly at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, carries that expectation like inherited gravity. It’s small, just over two feet by three, and painted not on canvas but on paper, enamel poured and flicked in black, white, and a few obedient dabs of red, yellow, and blue. The wall label calls it “full of energy and freedom.” That’s the kind of line museums use when they’re not sure what else to say. Pollock once claimed that when he painted, he wasn’t aware of what he was doing. The painting, he said, “has a life of its own.” For decades, that quote has been treated like scripture, proof that genius can transcend intention. But if we take him at his word, if he truly w...

Some films end with silence because there’s nothing left to say.  Hear Us  begins with it. The quiet between piano keys, the pause before a bow finds the string, these are not gaps but invitations. Three young musicians, each in a different country, stare into their screens and into each other’s patience.  The sound we hear first is not melody but effort: the rustle of sheet music, the hum of a radiator in Berlin, the echo of a practice room in Chicago.  And before we know who they are, we understand what unites them: an improbable attempt to make harmony across borders that treat them unequally. Rada Hanana, the Syrian pianist at the film’s center, fled Damascus as the sound of shelling replaced that of her metronome.    She is twenty-something now, a refugee in Germany, her childhood reduced to the weight of what she carried in her hands, scales, études, and memory.    The camera finds her not in tragedy but in transit: buses, hallways...

On certain nights, when the brain is tired but restless, you don’t want literature; you want company. Not philosophy, not moral weight, just a small engine of story to idle beside.  An Eye for Murder  by Libby Fischer Hellmann is built for exactly that kind of night. It doesn’t ask for devotion, only attention. The story moves with the confidence of a paperback you can trust: steady rhythm, clear stakes, no pretensions of grandeur. Ellie Forman, a Chicago documentary filmmaker, gets tangled in a murder investigation after a misdelivered letter arrives at her door. It’s the sort of coincidence that mysteries are made of, one small mistake that opens an entire world of secrets. Her curiosity, equal parts human and professional, leads her into the lives of strangers and the shadow of history, tracing threads back to the Holocaust and forward into her own neighborhood. The story is lean and unshowy, propelled not by literary flourish but by motion, something always happening, al...

There’s something disarming about standing in front of a painting that mocks the very idea of beauty while making it impossible to look away.  Gullscape  isn’t large by museum standards, just under six feet high, but it radiates a kind of stubborn stillness, a parody of serenity rendered in dots, lines, and mechanical logic. A few gulls hover near the lower right corner, almost lost in the geometry, like punctuation marks trying to reclaim the sentence. The sea is reduced to a pattern, the horizon to engineering.  Lichtenstein once said there was “something humorous about doing a landscape in a solidified way.” That humor is what holds  Gullscape  together: the joke that refuses to laugh. In 1964 , when the work debuted, America was still selling the postcard dream, beachfront optimism, the eternal afternoon of a rising middle class. Pop art arrived like a mirror that refused to flatter. Lichtenstein, borrowing the language of comic books and advertising, tur...

The sound hits first, not a roar, not quite chatter, but that middle frequency that only exists when a room is full and everyone’s trying to talk without raising their voice. The kind of noise that hums rather than shouts. That’s how Amelia’s Trattoria feels on a Wednesday night: half conversation, half heartbeat. The door shuts behind you, and the air changes, warm, dense, fragrant. Lemon, garlic, butter, and something faintly sweet like simmered tomatoes. A host appears almost instantly, efficient but unhurried, and before long, you’re winding past the copper fixtures and brick walls to a small table that looks as though it’s been waiting for you. The dining room isn’t large, but it’s alive. Couples leaning in close; a table of engineers dissecting their meal with mathematical precision; laughter ricocheting softly off the walls. It’s cozy in the literal sense, space at a premium, chairs close enough to make eavesdropping inevitable, yet it never feels cramped. The noise becomes par...

When Meddle arrived in November 1971, it wasn’t heralded as a revelation but as a reprieve. Pink Floyd had spent the year touring through England, America, and Europe, their identity thinning across endless shows and half-finished ideas. They were adrift between worlds: the psychedelic troupe Syd Barrett once guided had dissolved, and the meticulously conceptual Pink Floyd of the mid-’70s had not yet been born. Out of that uncertainty, long nights at Abbey Road and Morgan Studios, too many cables and too little direction, emerged something unexpectedly whole. The band began with nothing. No theme, no lyrics, just experiments: each member recording separately, unaware of what the others were playing, hoping accidents might reveal purpose. Hours of “Nothings,” “Son of Nothings,” and finally “Return of the Son of Nothings” filled the tape reels. Out of those fragments came a sound that felt alive in a way their conceptual ambitions never could. When  Meddle  opens with “One o...

There’s a particular kind of silence that lives between people who believe themselves to be honest. It isn’t empty; it hums with restraint, with the fear that real truth might collapse whatever delicate architecture holds them together. Sally Rooney’s  Conversations with Friends  lives entirely inside that silence, the hum of it, the ache of it, the moral static between wanting to be good and wanting to be seen. When I first read it, I kept thinking how few novels actually sound like the world we inhabit now, not in slang or technology, but in the rhythms of emotional exposure. Rooney captures that strange modern mixture of intimacy and remove, the way people confess too much and feel nothing, or say nothing and feel too much. Her characters, Frances, Bobbi, Nick, and Melissa, orbit each other in Dublin’s literary scene like satellites caught in one another’s gravity. They perform poetry, quote theory, and analyze everything except themselves. And still, they can’t stop woundi...

There’s a peculiar silence in Robert Cottingham’s  Pool,  the kind that hums just after something breaks. At first glance, everything looks intact. The steel façade glows in the late light, the painted brick looks warm, and the familiar “Diet Pepsi” logo anchors the composition with corporate cheer. But then your eye drifts upward, to the wooden ball rack hanging beside the window, the one meant to cradle billiard balls. A few are gone. The wires that once held them tight have snapped, curling into the air like tiny gestures of surrender. That’s where the painting begins to speak. Cottingham was a chronicler of the American city, but not in the way of social realists or romantics. His landscapes aren’t crowded with people or sentiment; they’re full of reflection, scaffolding, and signage. He painted the anatomy of attention: where we look, what sells to us, how light convinces us that everything is still working. But in  Pool (1973), he caught the moment that illusion sta...

Before California became a state of mind, it was an experiment. A laboratory of tan and tune, where the nation’s anxieties were filtered through Technicolor skies and the rhythm of the surf. Into this cheerful anthropology strolls Professor Robert Orville Sutwell, clipboard in hand, studying the rituals of the young like a field researcher among a tribe. He’s meant to be the adult in the room, the intellectual lens. But the joke, then and now, is that the kids don’t need studying. It’s the grown-ups who are the mystery. Beach Party  is pure silliness, and that’s what makes it so oddly enjoyable. The plot barely matters: Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello flirt and feud, Robert Cummings plays an anthropologist who falls for one of his subjects, and Dorothy Malone hovers like a bemused chaperone. There are songs, dances, motorcycles, and enough bronzed skin to make the Production Code sweat. Dick Dale shows up, not just as a soundtrack, but as a pulse, his guitar slicing through th...

I’ve always thought it strange how easily we forgive Tom Sawyer. Maybe it’s the grin. Maybe it’s because the book feels sun-washed and harmless, a postcard from a simpler America that never really existed. He lies, he manipulates, he plays at love and death, and we smile as though it were all rehearsal for virtue. We call it mischief. We call it youth. But somewhere inside that laughter, there’s a rehearsal for something darker, the first draft of guilt before America was ready to name it. When Mark Twain wrote  Tom Sawyer , he hadn’t yet turned the Mississippi into a moral river. This was still the story of boyhood before consequence, a way of looking backward toward a country that wanted to believe it had once been innocent. The war was over but not resolved; the South was broken and unrepentant, the North weary of righteousness. America needed a child to carry its myth of purity, someone to remind it that freedom was playful and consequences could be outwitted. Tom Sawyer became...