On the last evening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the reporter boarded a delegate bus for the United Center. As they waited to leave McCormick Place, the young man sitting next to him introduced himself as “a California delegate at the DNC” and said he had hoped to be asked […]
A Sunday school teacher taught me as a child that the Apocalypse would be ushered in by—among other signs—seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls. A newspaper colleague once joked to me years ago that God had traded His seven horsemen for a phalanx of car stereos booming out bass-heavy hip-hop. Both […]
The invention and evolution of insurance make for fascinating stories. According to historians, the first insured were not people but merchant shipments out of, and into, ancient India, Greece, or Babylon. Should your precious cargo disappear at sea due to bad weather, or on land thanks to banditry, and be covered in […]
When Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, I glanced at Homer’s lliad, piled onto my kitchen table with other books in a tower of procrastination, with grudging respect. When Hamas reignited the mostly dormant Israel-Palestine conflict on October 7 of last year, I grabbed the Illiad by the spine to […]
The photo on Facebook shows an older gentleman asleep with a cat on his chest, both smiling in their slumber. The caption explains that the man is the poster’s father, and that this is the father’s “last picture and just that evening, he was no more and took away a part of […]
It is often said that when an elder dies a library burns down. It could also be said that when a tavern keeper dies a tavern burns down. So many moments of fellowship, of shared music and drinks, that would have happened now will never happen—they vanished before they could exist. Jacobsmeyers […]
Nothing sorts extraordinary drives from ordinary ones quite like the selection of music to accompany the journey. That is especially true when the drive is long. A vacation drive has its own curious logistics of pre-planning. Water bottles must be cleaned out, snacks must be chosen for purchase, the endless worry of a […]
Washington University in St. Louis undergraduate student Alethea Franklin and St. Louis writer Marie Wenya Burns are the second annual recipients of the Heartland Journalism Fellowships. Established by WashU and the River City Journalism Fund, the Heartland Journalism Fellowships support development of aspiring minority and underrepresented writers. During their yearlong residency, which […]
The second meeting of the Poverty Council at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, titled “The Fierce Urgency of Now: How Democrats Can Win the Fight Against Poverty,” revealed another tension within the DNC. Susie Shannon, a California Health Commissioner and founder of the DNC Poverty Council opened the meeting […]
When I prepared my reading for the farewell poetry performance at the Way Out Club in July of 2021, I pulled only from my chapbook Shape of a Man because it occurred to me that Bob Putnam, co-owner of the club, was perhaps the first man I ever knew. I was old enough […]
