Over a half-dozen years ago, at least, I proposed to Gene Dobbs Bradford, then the executive director of Jazz St. Louis, and Phil Dunlap, the organization’s education director, to launch a book club. I am not sure what made me want to do it. It was not as though I lacked […]
I have always liked Westerns, and can claim my preference by birthright. I grew up in West Texas in the 1950s, a “flatlander” living in Lubbock, the biggest city on the Llano Estacado, once a dry, vast sea of grass unmarked by hill or tree that befuddled Conquistador Francisco Coronado, Buffalo […]
Researchers in the U.K. are studying tiny, everyday objects in the Early Middle Ages—keys, shoes, floor tiles, chests—and tracking their passage from person to person, which is quite a detective story. Looking at the artifacts, I think about the many ways keys still pass from hand to hand. How ceremoniously we are […]
• I knew that the ostrich was nothing for anyone to mess around with, but a magpie?! I should have known about magpies from watching the antics of Heckle and Jeckle as a kid but, alas, I thought they were mere Negro tricksters, to use a phrase, not actual deadly birds. […]
How does one prepare to have lunch with a mentalist? Caffeine to keep the brain alert? A mantra to stay resolute, braced against a mind meld? Do they even do that? Gary Chan performs at corporate events, at professional conferences, and most recently, for the FBI, who were impressed. He calls himself […]
The best scatological words are onomatopoetic. There. That sentence should remove any chance of sounding as gleeful as a fifth-grade boy who just learned to make his armpit fart. (Or should that party trick have a different name, as its toot arrives reeking only of boy body odor?) I tried using the […]
After any catastrophic break in routine, what feels remarkable is the everyday normalcy that preceded it. Washington University’s campus was flooded with students again—too soon, too hot for a fresh fall start. Pulling breath through air thick with humidity, I trudged over to Kaldi’s for an iced coffee. The line, widened by […]
After I thank D. Graham Burnett for his lyrical introduction to the book Affinities, we exchange a few emails about the importance of attention—how it is being stolen from us and how, if we want to stay sane, we need to seize back the reins. “You might want to review a little […]
It took four dogs for me to admit that my blithe offers of leashless abandon often ended in disaster. I wanted each dog to be able to run free, ears flying in the wind—and then run straight back to me. After leading me on long gleeful chases at the park, taking victory […]
It is thrilling to see literary fiction, crime, every category of fiction expand. We have learned enough about how brilliant White opium addicts and spunky old White ladies solve crimes. Stories set deep inside another culture fascinate me, and I love how sneaky they are, educating me without a hint of teaching […]
