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...