On the Narrow Road to the Interior

I will be writing from Japan over the next weeks, thanks to The Newman Exploration Center and a Newman Exploration Travel Fund Grant, funded by the Eric P. & Evelyn Newman Foundation, at Washington University in St. Louis. My main activity will be to walk a segment of poet Matsuo…

“Michelle, New Jersey”

“I knew I was a girl from the age of 5 or 6. There was no denying it. When the boys were out playing sports I was home trying my mom’s dresses and high-heel shoes. Now I celebrate who I am with entertainment. I’m a drag queen.”

“Mr. Stubbs, Scottsdale, Arizona”

Meet Mr. Stubbs. He was injured while being trafficked by illegal animal smugglers. He was found in a vehicle with roughly 20 other alligators. It would be safe to say Mr. Stubbs was hurt while being held by traffickers says Alex, his handler at the Phoenix Herpetological Society. As…

Hooray for Hollywood

To our Puritan, “agrarian” instincts, Hollywood is all that is wrong with America, the decadent city, the sin factory that has warped the culture beyond repair. Here is the trope of American declension.

A Professor Goes Out On the Street

This is not about how it feels to be homeless. It is merely about someone who, knowing little of such matters and without money in his pockets, went onto the streets of St. Louis and found shelter and food, and it is about what and whom he saw in the process.

Someone’s in the Kitchen with Dinah

Deetz’s Bound By Fire sets out to address our on-going gastronomic rehabilitation by focusing on the story of Virginia’s enslaved plantation cooks. She has taken on a difficult task, for those unsung chefs of the antebellum and colonial era left no cookery compilations or published sources behind.

How Enduring Failure Becomes Its Own Form of Triumph

Few historians so aptly make Grant and his time so legible to a 21st-century readership that continues to grapple with the political legacies of slavery and the Civil War.

Latin America’s Cold War Discontent

In an engaging, well-written, exhaustively-researched, even-handed, and insightful book, Patrick Iber not only brings to light previously obscure aspects of this story but also details the complexities and contradictions that bedeviled all sides of the struggle.

The Way Some Young People Perish

This story, like many stories, centers on a brief and chance encounter. Meeting Sam and then reading about his demise made me wonder how communities like mine could better support and care for young people who may be struggling, who may sometimes make the devastating choice to end their life.

Hollywood’s Publisher of Peccadilloes

Shocking True Story is a good, though by no means exhaustive or thorough, account of Confidential, Hollywood's publication of record for prurient interests.

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