He is on his hind legs, a blur of hyperwagged tail wiggling his rump from side to side, a wide open-mouthed grin encasing a pink tongue eager to lap the little boy’s outstretched hand. The parents squint at the card, then tug that outstretched hand away. Pitbull and lab mix, the card […]
This supply chain stuff is getting real. I write that sentence and then laugh at myself. Real, in a privileged first-world sense in which one’s trivial whims and tiny needs are not automatically, immediately accommodated. I have no idea what it feels like to not be able to get maintenance medicine or […]
What I miss most about restaurants started fifteen years before the pandemic. My husband and I were living on St. Louis’s South Side, and in cold weather, we walked to a cozy little restaurant called Langan’s every Friday evening. That fact alone would puzzle anyone who knows me well; I am hardly […]
“The tension between Negroes and Jews contains an element not characteristic of Negro-Gentile tension, an element which accounts in some measure for the Negro’s tendency to castigate the Jew verbally more often than the Gentile, and which might lead one to the conclusion that, of all white people on the face of […]
Joel Coen’s adaptation is a dreamlike, stunningly performed rendition of Shakespeare’s play. The Tragedy of Macbeth begins, appropriately, in pitch darkness. A black screen opens the film as we hear the single voice of the witches, all three played by the uncanny Kathryn Hunter. She delivers the play’s opening lines with a […]
The toughest times in our nation’s history were lightened by pure silliness, unapologetic frivolity, and melodies that made you want to dance. I tap my fingers, waiting. This is a tough time, too. Yes, I know, Omicron would keep us off the dance floor even if dance floors still existed. Instead of […]
The guys I knew in journalism worshipped Hunter S. Thompson. Literally worshipped, as though he were a mythic god and gonzo a rite of passage. They imitated his stunts, dreamed up pranks that would make him proud. One even took “Thomas Hunter” as his pseudonym. Me, I just loved Nellie Bly. Elizabeth […]
In Home, Land, Security: Deradicalization and the Journey Back From Extremism, Carla Power—a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for her previous book, If the Oceans Were Ink—moves slowly, gently, into a terrifying psychology. She wants to get past the horrors-wrought-by-monsters mindset, the one that slaps a […]
Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me Selar Shaik’s great ambition as a child was to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a great mahout, a keeper and driver of elephants, for the Maharajah of Mysore. He mounted an elephant for the first time at the age of three. He was […]
All viruses are sly and enigmatic, as cunning as a con artist in their search for a host, insidious in their damage, invisible. SARS CoV-2 doubled the mystery—where had it come from?—then compounded it by behaving in ways that threw us off base. A virus with both respiratory and GI symptoms? One […]
