I was in an elevator yesterday–we don’t spend a lot of time in elevators in Kansas City, Missouri–and a smartly-dressed guy with good hair gave me a look. I looked back at him. It was just the two of us in the elevator. I don’t know what kind of a look we were giving one another. It wasn’t a sexual look, but then, asexual looks can be the most sexual looks of all, if you know what I mean. It was a look of recognition, as though suddenly we were acknowledging that neither one of us were mere objects, like the carpeted walls of the elevator and the two lonely illuminated buttons we had pushed and the door we were both waiting on, hoping it would open.

Sartre called this “The Look,” when you realize, with a kind of shock and terror, that another universe is there beside you, one you can never grasp, that everywhere that universe is oriented is oriented away from you, so that just as…

Last week, one of my students committed suicide. A few months ago, another of my students killed himself. I was talking about this with a friend, trying to deal with it, and she told me about a student of hers who killed himself a month or so ago, and had texted her immediately before he died.

These three students were in many ways quite similar: all were unusually bright, highly motivated, upper middle class, talented, male, and (at least in the case of both of my students) a bit uneasy, a bit more eager to prove themselves than the other students around them. Or I could be simply projecting that anxiety onto them now, as a consequence of their action. The first friend I ever had who killed himself was a kid named Ben who was in I.B. Physics with me at Western Canada High School in Calgary, Alberta. We competed with one another in physics, the class that really counted for the I.B….

Say there’s someone you’d love to seduce. Or maybe you want to be seduced yourself. Seduction, as we know, almost always involves ploys, feints, disguises, manipulations, even downright lies–and often leaves the seduced feeling manipulated, used or worse.