Saint Louis Art Museum’s Art in Bloom, now in its twentieth year, is the museum’s most popular event, a long weekend of activities centering around the pairing of specific works of art in the galleries with flower arrangements, which reimagine them, by mostly professional floral designers and garden club members.
Like war in the Middle East, military-grade weaponry, partisan enmity in politics, and utility trucks and RVs, the hamburger endures because it delivers recombinant flavors in huge doses of fat and salt that land in the stomach like a firm, reliable handshake.
Back when I attended the original Jungle Operations Training Center, in the spring of 1984, it was run entirely by US Army cadre, and the Russians were the bad guys. We were told a Russian trawler offshore was monitoring and trying to disrupt our radio communications on field exercises, and the outlined figures on paper targets at army rifle ranges wore Warsaw Pact helmets. “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,” as the first industrial-colonial power in Panama says. But the rigors of the Panamanian landscape and its climate have proved difficult for all foreign comers for 525 years.
How did a complete lack of meaning, paired with simple gestures, become a grand celebratory act for this generation?
Sport, like the university, like any institution, is a human construction. It reflects the fears and desires of those who manage it. To demand that it remain apolitical is to demand that it remain unexamined. What would it mean to refuse that demand consistently?
David L. Roll builds on previous biographies of Harry S. Truman and does not try to reinvent the proverbial wheel. He has found a new angle that should have a wide-ranging appeal.
Harold Compton tries, in the expansive sense of the words time and history, to focus himself on the present. Because that word history, he says, can overwhelm you.But his job is one rooted in the past. Of his people. And not of his people. Of the Jesuits, too.
“Where We Keep The Light” is a cagey book, hardly surprising for a politician as skilled as Shapiro to write. Clearly wishing to capitalize on the national fame he achieved when he was considered for the vice presidency and was so touted as the superior candidate for it, even by Trump supporters, who breathed a sigh of relief that he was not chosen, the book gives his resume, stakes out his positions, makes the case for him as both the hard-working but empathetic professional and the dedicated family man, and takes sonar soundings of the political deep in hopes of hearing something other than an echo.
Today’s influencers, panicked by AI and its ability to mimic or replace us altogether, preach a new vitalism. Often masculine, sometimes misogynist, this energy is wild and brave and noble, a birthright that cannot be replaced.
Cartoons are one of my favorite things on Instagram, especially when they touch on humor, confusion, sadness, practical philosophy, and cultural critique.