The farm sits on a hill an hour northeast of Knoxville. It encompasses sixty acres, but only one and a half are devoted to garden produce—beans, kale, corn, squash, carrots, onions, garlic, basil, et cetera. Another six are pasture for the two cows, three pigs, six sheep, and fifty or so chickens. The rest is woods. The farm is owned by a couple in their mid-thirties who live there with their 4-year-old son and a beagle named Barney. They sell most of their produce through a CSA, and the rest at a weekly farmer's market, along with meat, eggs, and baked goods. At the moment I'm the only intern. Read More

The Bella Center sits on the edge of Copenhagen, kilometers from the city center, past a processional of Socialist-bloc apartments, car dealerships, and smoking power plants. It is here that the UNFCCC has been meeting for the last week, as frustrated negotiators try to hammer out a new international climate framework. Coming out by bus, one passes kilometers of gray, empty fields flanked by cranes and construction. The only symbol of the vaunted "green" economy is a cyclopean wind turbine that spins in the distance, Blade Runner-esque. Upon arrival, the canopied entrance of the complex makes one think of a trade show hall in Dayton, Ohio. Second-tier attendees like journalists and people from NGOs wait for hours in the bitter cold before being shuffled through airport metal detectors and eventually waved into the overcrowded conference center.  Read More

My father claims that when I was a sophomore in college he was at the Madison, Wisconsin apartment I shared with three roommates—I don't know why he would have been there, but no matter where I am, or how old I get, there inevitably comes a time when I need my dad to come help me with something—and my best friend and I were watching a golf tournament, out of our heads rooting for Tiger Woods to win. I suppose it's possible—this would have been when he was still all hype, and it's not hard to imagine how we might have been eager for him to validate that hype with actual greatness. But for as long as I can remember, I have hated Tiger Woods, and not for the same reason I used to hate Michael Jordan back when he was the greatest athlete on the planet: because I loved the Milwaukee Bucks. Rather, my dislike for Tiger Woods has always had to do with the way in which, a generation after Jordan, he emerged as not only the next greatest athlete on the planet but the next greatest athlete brand. Far more by way of the Tiger brand than any of the golf tournaments he's won over the years, Woods has surpassed a billion dollars in earnings. A billion dollars. That's a thousand million, for those of you who—like me—are disposed to think of the quantity in terms you can more easily relate to. Of course, if you are like me, you can't really relate to the concept of a million dollars. These days—I've come a long way baby—I operate on the level of thousands. So to put it in terms that people like me might be able to relate to, that's a million thousands: having a thousand dollars a million times over. One could also say—for those who, as I did just a few years ago, still relate to things on the level of single, individual dollars—that that's a billion single, individual dollars. But then we'd be back where we started. Read More

The Artificial Mountain

Well we were all set to build Indiana's first official mountain. But then some folks showed up all yelling about how this mountain we were building might destroy some habitats. "There's no need to worry about that, folks," our foreman said. "What we're gonna do is build this mountain from one-hundred-percent natural habitat. If anything we'll be adding thousands of tons more habitat to your state, in an upward direction." Well this got them to squawking amongst themselves. One old man came forward and asked did we have a permit. "Everything by the book," said the foreman. "Fact of the matter is we have a book full of permits, for anything you'd like." Did we have a permit for falling in love with one's own sister? Yessir, we did, and the foreman handed a copy of it to the old man. The old man smiled to break your heart. He called out, "Bitty!" and an old woman appeared out of the crowd with a sort of glow all over her face. It was the sweetest thing you'd ever seen, those two old people coming together after what must have been years. They held hands and ambled back to their car. The foreman waved them off with his hat in his hand, and wished them luck, and we turned to start on our mountain. Read More

Lago Argentino 01/31/09

Pink puffs of Chilean flamingos aglow in the dusky light; black-necked swans drifting on the silver brimming water; a silvery grebe with its long narrow nozzle of a bill darting across the mud; the strange opaque color of the water (due to calcium carbonate from the glaciers), as of frosted glass; the horses being watered by the two horsemen; quarreling, sportive stray dogs here with us among the purple tufts of bending grasses along the margins of the huge lake—and away in the distance the jaggedest, most savage-looking mountains I have ever seen, whether here in the Andes or in the Rockies or the Sierra Nevada or the Himalaya: a heap of diorite shards like a palisade erected by God in anger to keep two worlds apart ... The feeling of the human or at least European presence here as some thin imposture on the alien landscape. A terrifically windy country also.

We seem to be the only tourists out bird-watching; the rest are shopping in town.

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It was with some surprise that I learned of Emily Gould's ad hominem attack on me at nplusonemag.com ("Bad Romance," November 30).

Her vitriol against my new book, A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the 21st Century, seems based, overwhelmingly and inexplicably, on her reading of its Acknowledgments section.

If anyone was worried that the Obama administration would represent a break with the past, the President's recent actions in Latin America should assuage any lingering concerns. As Obama was preparing to announce an escalation of American commitments in Afghanistan, he was also preparing, more quietly and furtively, to recognize Sunday's elections in Honduras, which took place under a military coup government, as well as to expand the US military presence in Colombia to seven military bases, under the pretext of enlarging the limitless "war on drugs." Latin America has long been the testing ground for US policies that found more forceful expression elsewhere—"empire's workshop," Greg Grandin has called it. From the 1901 Platt Amendment, which legitimated US indirect control over Cuba, to the proxy wars in Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, the essential character of the US was seen most clearly in the countries just to the south. The events of the last few months reveal no fundamental change. Read More

Cristina Nehring. A Vindication of Love: Reinventing Romance for the 21^st Century. Harper. June 2009.

Julie Metz. Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal. Hyperion VOICE. June 2009.

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"What is love?"

The 1993 global dance-pop mega-hit never answered the question, substituting instead a weak plea:

Baby, don't hurt me
don't hurt me
no more. 

Cristina Nehring also fails to define the emotional phenomenon she's charged herself with vindicating, but she certainly doesn't beg not to be hurt. Quite the opposite: for Nehring, truly loving means embracing pain.  She disdains Valentine's roses, cozy snuggling, even vibrators—all the sappy rituals and pathetic artifacts our culture has produced to compensate for an epidemic lack of passion. By contrast, Nehring's old-style "love" is "a religion, a high-risk adventure, an act of heroism ... ecstasy and injury, transcendence and danger, altruism and excess." Today's "love" is commodified and ordinary and perpetually available. It can no longer ennoble our souls. Two apparently contradictory forces—the anti-feminist "cult of safe love" and the "man-hating clichés of old-style feminism"—have rendered us timid where we should be fearless. To re-inspire (or, as she might put it, "re-ensoul") us, Nehring has written a polemic in the form of a parade of exemplary lovers from history and literature. Read More

Stephanie Meyer has said that the idea for the Twilight series came to her in a dream, but it may as well have come to her in a graduate seminar. There are, after all, few other contexts where so much cultural baggage comes together under the sign of so many backpacks. 

New Moon, the latest film installment of the colossally popular franchise, opened this past weekend, breaking box office records and putting reviewers everywhere to work. What, everyone is asking, is Twilight "really" about?

It's over. The best team in baseball in 2009 won the World Series, and for a fan of the New York Mets, it couldn't have turned out worse. Our two most-hated enemies facing off; it's amazing that I tuned in at all. This year, though, the Mets tanked so early that I was hungry for baseball again by the time the World Series arrived—and I watched every game. I don't know what I was looking for, but I was looking. Maybe I wanted to see the Phillies' Pedro Martinez crush the Yankees' hopes—something we'd never gotten the chance to see him do while playing for the Mets.

There were great moments: Chase Utley's and Hideki Matsui's home runs; Pedro laughing at the crowd as he exited Game 2 to chants of "Who's your daddy?"; Cliff Lee's chillingly nonchalant fielding in the first game; the free Brooklyn Lagers my friends and I were given every time the Yankees hit a home run on Halloween (that place was great: beer, a jazz band, a holiday atmosphere). But an uneasy feeling arose as the Yankees closed in on the win in Game 6, and, as some kind of self-defense, I fell asleep during the eighth inning. When I awoke the game was over.

I have plenty of reasons not to hate the Yankees. A relative on my mother's side, Herb Pennock—the Knight of Kennett Square (Pennsylvania)—was a star pitcher for four champion Yankee teams, including the famed 1927 squad, and is in the Hall of Fame. And my father's family comes from the Bronx. But they were always Giants fans, before the Giants fled to California, and they were happy to see the Mets take their beloved Polo Grounds (at Coogan's Bluff in upper Manhattan) in 1962—they moved to Shea two years later. And I've always associated the Yankees with the bad, Giuliani New York. In any case, I'm glad to be a Mets fan. Read More