“Go and visit that feverish and dreamy city.” ~ Georgio de Chirico New York has been the center of the world (one of the centers? It would say otherwise) for a rather long time. Just the city’s name means things—variously defined—to people all over the world. This was truest in the twentieth […]
One of this summer’s big exhibits at the Cooper Hewitt, America’s design museum, explores “the unique role design can play in pursuing peace.” How many people will hear that and roll their eyes? So often, the visual arts either content themselves with dark, bitter commentary or stay out of the fray altogether. The […]
Penises are exploding all over the news cycle. At second glance, though, two are the same article, “Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement,” co-published by Pro Publica and The New Yorker. (The New York Times piped up a few days earlier to tell us about a newly approved gel that “helps men […]
My calm Midwestern life has been punctuated by three precious trips to New York, a city of dashes and exclamations. Also a city of jazz, though I never seem to be there with anyone willing to go listen. This time, I resolved to go alone. I had one night free. And I lucked […]
I am back from a glorious week in New York, and the dog is throwing up. I need to do a boatload of laundry, make pesto before the basil bolts, type up three fat notebooks scribbled during the trip, pick up library books, grocery shop, and make a colonoscopy appointment. My husband hears me […]
It has been years. Decades, in fact. Yet my car zips into the drive-through without hesitation. Not even glancing at the menu, I order myself a cone. Vanilla, not enrobed in chocolate or busted up with nuts. No husband nearby to arch an eyebrow, no dog to insist on sharing. I skid into […]
Dr. William Beaumont—wealthy, respected, refined—leans over the body of Alexis St. Martin—an illiterate nineteen-year-old French Canadian—and threads a piece of string through an accidental opening. Dangling the thread down into St. Martin’s stomach, Beaumont swishes it about, then, at timed intervals, hoists up the piece of raw or cooked meat tied to the […]
Long, narrow, and plumpish, with eyes on stalks and a mouthish, tiny-toothed claw at the end of its flexible, one-nostrilled nose, the Tully Monster is devoid of prettiness. Yet its ugliness is the sort that Picasso insisted could be beautiful. Francis Tully, an amateur fossil-hunter, unearthed this fourteen-inch puzzle sixty-five years […]
In the 1990s, yards all over South St. Louis were dotted with hot pink plastic flamingos. They lined sidewalks, nestled in bushes, popped up in the middle of spongy Bermuda grass. Huge flocks of them filled tony St. Louis Hills, right on the “other side of the tracks” from our smaller, more […]
You feel too pale, naked, slippery. Not heavy enough. Moving through the world, you yearn for a more lumbering gait; see huge branches and want to grasp them between paws; study your cuticles and wish for long, curved, sharply pointed nails. Since childhood, you have been convinced that secretly, deep inside, you […]