In The Beginning Of Desire, a close reading of the Book of Genesis, Rabbi Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg interprets the Flood story as a metaphor for pregnancy and birth. Noah floats, silent and surrounded by symbols of generative potential, in an amniotic sea inside the womb of the ark. After a period of labor — forty […]
Category Archives: General News
I can’t feel my face
Hand sanitizer reminds me of the worst days of chemotherapy. We’d never used it before. But we were taking the train back and forth to Sloan Kettering, and standing in crowds, trying our best to stay upright. We didn’t want to pick up any opportunistic infections. At the hospital, dispensers of Purell foam were everywhere. […]
The crack-up
Overlooked amidst the noise, but still significant: New Jersey and New York visitors to Florida must now go through a fourteen-day quarantine before entering the state. This decision was made by the governor of Florida, who has been criticized for his refusal to close the beaches. Yesterday’s order felt like a compensatory move — a […]
Pharmacy
I’m afraid to go to the pharmacy. But we knew we had to do it: we had to get medicine for Hilary. She’d tried to get the doctor to mail it to us, but his office called in the prescription instead. I suppose if we’d really been paranoid, we could have asked the pharmacy to […]
Uneasy Sunday
A guy, outside the liquor store at the intersection of 4th Street and Newark Ave.: “they’re not going to put you in jail for being outside.” Policemen would have their hands full. Lots of foot traffic on Jersey and Newark yesterday — people getting provisions, walking dogs, talking to friends from the safety of the […]
Spring forward, lock down
At 1 p.m. the Governor delivers the order we all knew was coming. All businesses defined by the state as nonessential must close for the duration at 9 p.m. tonight. How many of those businesses will reopen is anybody’s guess. Sit-down restaurants will still be allowed to do takeout and delivery, but realistically, that’s no […]
Rights and wrongs
By now, you’ve probably seen the interactive world map through which Johns Hopkins is charting the spread of COVID-19. It’s part video game UI, part stock report, and all alarming. The Hopkins tally reinforces something that’s been widely reported: the number of deaths in Italy now exceeds those in China, even though twice as many […]
On Zoom
I’ve never used Zoom before tonight. I’m not sure I ever want to do it again. But for forty-five minutes or so, I got to see my sister and her children, my brother-in-law, a pair of sibling cousins of mine who were central to my youth and remain important to me, my mother, and three […]
Five day count
We woke up to the news that the University will remain online-only for the rest of the semester. We knew this was coming, but it’s still dispiriting. The original plan, which was sent last Wednesday, was to reconvene classes on March 30. That seemed optimistic to us, a real long-shot, but as long as it […]
Slightly past the ides
I’ve put this off long enough. Everything I’ve done for a long time has been governed by superstition, so I must believe that journals bring bad luck. But I wish I’d kept a daily record in the wake of the destruction of the Twin Towers, and along with that collapse, the loss of the sense […]