Truckloads of paintings and artworks attempt to depict or advocate political and historical events and eras. The Romans constructed arches to commemorate military victories for the foundation and building of empire. Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) rings a collective bell inside our national head every time we see it. […]
Long before Jazz St. Louis was a mainstream arts organization in a branded arts district with its own performance space named after some of our most important local philanthropists, it was a phantom of the heart. It felt more like some scrappy club than a not-for-profit corporation. When I was introduced to […]
Bill Gass would have turned 100 this year, and colleagues, family, friends, and admirers held a centenary celebration of his life and work last week here at Washington University, where Gass was a professor of philosophy for 30 years. (He died at 93.) He was, as everyone notes, known more widely as […]
Flea Bodine was a very particular type of rock musician, almost only found playing bass guitar, which would become Flea’s instrument, or rhythm guitar. This is the musician who is drafted into a band in need of a particular instrument that is not especially difficult to learn and who then learns that […]
The reporter’s people had been good citizens over the centuries, fought in the wars, built businesses, practiced law, founded a town, held office, shaped some policy, bought houses, taught school. But if he traced out their efforts and sacrifices, looking for lasting significance, he lost the trail every time, usually instantly, except […]
On the last evening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the reporter boarded a delegate bus for the United Center. As they waited to leave McCormick Place, the young man sitting next to him introduced himself as “a California delegate at the DNC” and said he had hoped to be asked […]
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 stereos booming out bass-heavy hip-hop. Both […]
The invention and evolution of insurance make for fascinating stories. According to historians, the first insured were not people but merchant shipments out of, and into, ancient India, Greece, or Babylon. Should your precious cargo disappear at sea due to bad weather, or on land thanks to banditry, and be covered in […]
When Putin’s Russia invaded Ukraine in late February 2022, I glanced at Homer’s lliad, piled onto my kitchen table with other books in a tower of procrastination, with grudging respect. When Hamas reignited the mostly dormant Israel-Palestine conflict on October 7 of last year, I grabbed the Illiad by the spine to […]
The photo on Facebook shows an older gentleman asleep with a cat on his chest, both smiling in their slumber. The caption explains that the man is the poster’s father, and that this is the father’s “last picture and just that evening, he was no more and took away a part of […]
