” Saving nature’s unborn from Gulf oil disaster ,” the headline at CNN reads.
Hard to know how the oil spill threatened them, but the subject looked interesting.
So I clicked on it, to find that it was a feel-good story about efforts to relocate clutches of sea-turtle eggs to beaches away from oil stains.
Nice. But ask yourself this about the language of American journalism today, the next time you think about abortion: Why is an animal awaiting birth unborn , while a human awaiting birth is lump of tissue ?
Notes on Anosmia
One morning several years ago, as my wife, Wendy, and I were having breakfast together, I had…
Empire of Unreality
Shiva Naipaul (1945–1985) was the author of three novels and two books of mordant dispatches from places…
The Dreadful Christ of Pär Lagerkvist
It’s dangerous to meet a god,” says the disgraced Pythia in Pär Lagerkvist’s The Sibyl. Her observation…