Color photograph of writer and editor Garret Keizer.

Garret Keizer

Garret Keizer is a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine and the author of Getting Schooled, The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want, and Privacy

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Memento Mori and the Melting Ice

By Garret Keizer

The rationale of the memento mori tradition is that we’ll commit fewer sins, waste less time, if we remember our end. That we won’t be such jerks. “Depend upon it, sir,” says Samuel Johnson, “when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” More

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