In 1976, James Baldwin showed up in Berkeley to visit me and we hung out and had a great time. Although he never mentioned Truman Capote, I am willing to bet that if I had asked him he would have said, “Yeah, I stopped off to see if you were here to see him on my way out of New York.” The fictional truth is a greater truth than any that we have in real life.
The young man talked another 40 minutes. The bus crawled through rush hour and the security perimeter at the United Center, where Harris would make her speech. There was no bathroom or water on the bus, and no exiting it.
(Wiki-CC) 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…
The “eternity crystal,” was developed by a team inside the Optoelectronics Research Centre at England’s University of Southampton. Using lasers at blindingly fast speeds, the research team inscribed this tiny disc with all the genetic information a mad scientist would need to fuse it with synthesized material and existing cells to bring humanity back from whatever brink—nuclear annihilation, climate change, asteroid shower—marked our end.
It is predictable, but also true, to say that the Iliad makes poetry out of war and conflict. It is more precise to say that the Iliad reminds us that war and conflict are always with us, whether in open conflagration and mounting body counts or simmering beneath the surface.
If visual-textual AI literacy is this bad, what (else) will Americans believe about, say, politics, based on social media posts with altered or fictional material? I think we know but pretend not to.
When Bobby Kirksey bought Jacobsmeyers—already a legacy tavern in Granite City—he made it clear to his musician friends that his tavern was open to us. He meant it.
Sitting in my idle rental car at various stoplights in rural Michigan, I felt the transcendent parallel fifths of Claude Debussy’s “La cathedral engloutie” wash over my ears all over again.
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.
The Common Reader goes to Chicago to check in with the Democratic Party.