By Eric Le Roy
El Conejito
I guess the frenzy is fading now, but (as usual, a day late and a dollar short) I would like to record a few belated thoughts on the recent Super Bowl in America. Not the game itself, mind you, which by all accounts was as boring as an argument between two dead people, but the Half Time Show, featuring an enterprising dude with … Read the rest
I don’t enjoy writing this kind of essay. It is the intellectual equivalent of cleaning a greasy kitchen: necessary, unpleasant, and guaranteed to offend the people who insist the smell is “authentic tradition.” But if we’re going to talk honestly about political extremes, you don’t get to treat one side as a dangerous cult and the other as a quirky hobby. Extremes are not philosophies. They are stress reactions with … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Sometimes a death in the family comes like grief poured over your head, a bucketful of black water. You can drown that way. Sometimes it feels like liberation. Often, it’s more of a handshake. That’s how it was with my Dad and me.
Earlier this week, a friend told me that his mother had passed. She was 93. My friend has also been subjected … Read the rest
There is a kind of noise that comes after a shot. Not only the sound in the street, but the sound in the mind. People rush to fill the silence with a story, because silence feels like weakness. And in America, silence is treated like surrender.
So a woman is dead, an agent is alive, and a short video floats through phones like a torn page from a longer book… Read the rest
Work, in the long view, is a moving target. For most of our species’ history we did not “have jobs”; we had tasks that followed daylight, seasons, and stomachs. Hunter-gatherer life combined bursts of high effort with long stretches of social time—mending, storytelling, tool care, childcare. Ethnographic estimates vary, but the pattern is consistent: subsistence came in pulses, not in 8-hour rectangles. The body we still carry—ultradian focus cycles, circadian … Read the rest
