I was raised to tell white lies. To tell White lies, the sort my people use to shelter one another from unpleasant truths. No raw honesty seeped into our proper world, just bland assurances and an endless trove of compliments. For some, the goal was simply the expectation: nicey-nice. For my mother, though, […]
Centuries before we turned to wristwatches and cell phone screens it was sundials and the ancient obelisks of Greece and Rome that told us the time of day. There was no electricity to mediate the day, hour, or minute. Light did it all. If we want to discuss metaphors light, perhaps […]
Gratitude is an acceptance letter, a winning number, the free lunch you were told was impossible. In the language of spirit, gratitude conjures grace: a gift you did nothing to earn. Gratitude lets you feel like you will have what you need to make your journey. And it spills over into appreciation—of the […]
The cartoonist Roz Chast, of New Yorker fame, was in St. Louis on Monday to do a reading from her new book, I Must Be Dreaming (Bloomsbury, 2023). The event was expected to draw more people than the usual bookstore space could host, so tickets were sold months in advance for […]
Before misinformation, disinformation, Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica fiasco, and “deep fakes” it is hard to remember the time when the internet was a (largely) uncorrupted landscape of novel, good-hearted fun. From cat videos to laughing babies, everyone had their favorites when the internet was still young. The slow-moving genre loosely known as […]
Creativity is, by definition, the opposite of formula. So why do supposed creatives get rich selling other people formulas? When Paul Guyot started writing screenplays, the only how-to book was the one Syd Field wrote in 1979, when hardly anybody knew what screenwriting was. Field’s only movie credit at the time was Spree, […]
About six years before she died, my mom began suffering with rheumatoid arthritis—and yeah, it was “suffering,” not “living with” or “surviving” or any of the other empowering turns of phrase. RA’s fatigue and pain and stiffness made it hard for Nette, whose life had been a blur of sports, work, housework, and […]
According to Jerry Seinfeld, St. Louis is (sort of) his alpha and omega. He was in town for a standup concert last night at the Enterprise Center, an 18,000-seat venue where the St. Louis Blues play. Seinfeld said when his sitcom “bombed” originally, appearing in a bad slot midweek after Unsolved Mysteries, […]
Christopher Stark’s world premiere of “Cocci di tempo” (which he translates from Italian as “Shards of time”) on Saturday, October 28 at Washington University’s 560 Music Center was a collaboration between the composer and 48 St. Stephen, the piano-violin duet who brought it to life. Stark, who teaches composition in WashU’s […]
If necessity is the mother of invention, convenience is the father of a strange brand of privileged indifference. The advent of indoor plumbing in the mid-nineteenth century improved daily life and public health by such exponential leaps and bounds that we shudder to think of life without an indoor toilet or […]
