Lysistrata it ain’t. It’s actually much much better. — Something absolutely fascinating is happening right now, and I never saw it coming: women across the globe are opting out. By “opting out,” I mean they are choosing career over marriage and children, and it is having profound consequences on the world economy. Fewer children means dwindling populations. Dwindling populations…

To “see through a glass darkly” is to have a warped vision of reality. What’s yours? — I think I might know something about you. Let’s see if I’m right. By the mere fact of you reading a publication like Cappuccini, I can reasonably surmise: 1) friends are likely to describe you as “curious,” “intellectually driven,” or “empathetic,” 2) you are probably retired, or if not retired…

And my review of it addresses an even darker subject: us. — Yesterday, The New York Times published the results of a yearlong investigation into the systemic sexual abuse of female athletes in the U.S. Women’s Soccer League. …

We are all drowning in a sea of irrelevance. It is difficult, if not impossible, to describe Internet culture without betraying the woeful prejudices of my generation. For a long time, I skulked along the baseboards of my own curmudgeonly distrust of what I was seeing on Instagram, Snapchat, and…

One of the most remarkable painters of any age. — A woman’s body is not her own, not in art, not in life. In art, it has long been coopted by male artists, studied, “improved upon,” re-configured. Under the brushwork of male artists, breasts are rendered dome-like, impossibly pert, with none of their fleshful gravity. …

Some say it’s good. Some say it’s bad. I say it’s overdue and inevitable. — A curious phenomenon is happening in the arts. Living as I do in the hinterlands of Italy, I was only recently made aware of a cultural reckoning that is shaking the very foundations of my profession (writing and publishing), and every other profession that falls within the rubric of creative…

To this day, we have no idea what happened or even who her mother was. — I promised to keep you abreast of my historic fiction novel (working title: Dearest Shelley, but that is likely a placeholder and will morph into something different when I’m through) based on the hauntingly unhappy love triangle of 19th century Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary Shelley (famed…