Author: My World of Interiors
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The Ten Songs That Capture the Soul of America
America has often sung what it could not admit in speech. Its songs have carried grief before the law recognised suffering, desire before society permitted freedom, rage before politics found language, and longing before the country had earned the ideals it claimed for itself. If the American novel is a courtroom of conscience, and American…
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The Ten Novels That Capture the Soul of America
America has always been a country unusually dependent on story. Before it became a superpower, before it became a marketplace, before it became a screen onto which the rest of the world projected desire and dread, it was already narrating itself: as wilderness, covenant, republic, frontier, refuge, opportunity, innocence, exception, destiny. No nation has been…
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The Ten Films That Capture the Soul of America
America did not merely invent Hollywood. It invented one of the most persuasive dream machines in human history. More than any other modern art form, cinema allowed America to export itself: its landscapes, faces, appetites, terrors, fantasies, violence, tenderness, vulgarity, idealism and loneliness. The American film is not simply entertainment. At its most revealing, it…
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The Ten Paintings That Capture the Soul of America
America has often explained itself through words: declarations, amendments, sermons, speeches, songs, campaign slogans, courtroom arguments, advertising copy. But its deeper truths have often appeared first as images. Paintings, unlike political speeches, do not have to pretend to resolve contradiction. They can hold opposites in the same frame: liberty and violence, innocence and denial, loneliness…
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The American Imagination: 100 Groundbreaking Moments in the Arts
American art has never been a single tradition. It is not one style, one canon, one language, one race, one city, one market, one mythology, or one moral direction. It is a field of struggle: Indigenous geometry and settler expansion, enslaved song and constitutional rhetoric, Puritan severity and surrealist nightmare, Black rhythm and white appropriation,…
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The American Conscience
America’s finest leadership has not always come from the White House. Sometimes it has. There have been moments when presidents restrained themselves, widened the law, rebuilt former enemies, defended constitutional order or placed human dignity above immediate popularity. But more often, the moral leadership of America has come from those outside formal power: abolitionists, fugitives,…
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Happy Birthday, America — The Best of You Has Always Fought the Worst of You
Happy birthday, America — though the words do not come easily this year. On 4 July 2026, the United States marks 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Officially, it is a commemoration of the birth of the republic, the semiquincentennial of the moment when thirteen colonies declared themselves no longer subjects…
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We The People – The United States of America at 250
The Unfinished We Today, the United States turns 250 years old. Officially, the occasion marks the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the founding document by which thirteen colonies announced themselves as a nation. But an anniversary is never only a celebration. It is also an interrogation. It asks not merely what…
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Chapter 41: I Want You, I Need You, I Love You
On the morning of my twenty-first birthday, I’m woken by the boy, eager to show me his present. He pulls me out of bed and drags me downstairs.“C’mon, you lazy thing!” he laughs, hauling me through the kitchen, where Miss Mary has laid out a proper birthday feast.“Morning, sunshine,” she greets, opening the back door…
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The Culture Now: Lebanon
A country that keeps rebuilding its culture before it finishes rebuilding anything else There is a version of Beirut that exists mostly in retrospect — golden light, café terraces, a cosmopolitan capital briefly nicknamed the Switzerland of the Middle East. That version keeps reappearing in the culture discussed below, not as nostalgia exactly, but as…
