Credit: 70023venus2009 via Flickr “You don’t know what the AOS is?” The shock in Shawn’s voice borders on pity. “We’ll take you,” promises Susan. They dive into a conversation about the latest hot item, a rug of magical price and quality. The lucky folks who snagged one started photographing their…
A border Mass near El Paso. (Credit: Abby Grunzinger) The wallets were what got me. They fool you, because they seem so practical, just neat, safe folders of money. Yet they also hold us, flattened into paper: our name, our age, where we live, who we love. Their edges soften…
Family, friends, and other trusted people often serve as back-ups to parts of ourselves we hope to return to. They are our satellite campuses, our branch libraries, our outposts in wildernesses where we do not often go. The other day I posted a screed on social media by a dead…
Hitchcock’s biography imparts a great deal of information about Ike and his times, enough so that the reader can make his or her own judgment about his career. One of the work’s weaknesses is that it does not set Eisenhower’s presidential choices within the context of the times, namely public opinion.
What the Eyes Don't See is a deeply-readable tale of science, public health sleuthing, and a fight for social justice for some of America’s most disfranchised citizens.
Rich manages to capture the messiness of the human experience, having his characters live in the gray moral reality rather than the black-and-white dichotomies presented in the abstract.
A friend told me he would visit a Chuck Berry house museum if it was filled with guitars. I said it was likely never filled with guitars when Berry was starting out, and it was important that the music came despite (or due to?) a lack of things.
Camp is brilliant at introducing irony where it once did not exist, but now irony exists everywhere; its distance and layering are our habitual mode of perception, absent only in cults and Waldorf preschools. What role is left for camp to play?
“Botanica Absentia” by Margaret Keller (Credit: Courtesy of Margaret Keller) The room is a velvety, lightless black, except at the center, where light refracts through dichroic glass pendants and makes rainbows on the holographic floor. They are meant to cheer us up. This is Margaret Keller’s Botanica Absentia installation at…
(Credit: anokarina via Flickr) “Today, it’s spring,” I announce to myself, taking the cheery tone kindergarten teachers use with the recalcitrant. Deep inside, I am still stomping my foot, because this is all wrong. It is still winter. Last week, there were a few sunny, chilly days that felt like…