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Happy Birthday, Elvin Jones

    On this day (September 9), 94 years ago, jazz drummer Elvin Jones was born in Pontiac, Michigan, to a musical family. He cut his teeth as a professional musician in post-WWII Detroit, a hothouse of great Black musicians that included his brothers, Thad, a cornetist, who went to considerable fame as co-leader of […]

Twenty Years After 9/11: History Repeats Itself

    Milestones rehearse and punctuate our memories—but in the case of Afghanistan, history never had a chance to cool. Twenty years after 9/11, we are left wondering: Could we have made more of a difference? To what extent will Taliban rule oppress women and shelter future terrorists? Should we have even tried nation-building, or […]

Vermeer’s Cupid Has Been Set Free

    When I was single and grumbling about it, my mother used to say, “All it takes is a day.” One shift of the kaleidoscope, one chance meeting, and bitter loneliness drops away and the world glows with promise. That fast, your life has a different direction, a different set of possibilities. This is […]

If I Were a Dragonfly

            I tried to chase one once. Finally stopped, dizzy and breathless, and just watched the loops and swoops, sunlight shining through those transparent, delicately veined wings, the spindly body a bright iridescent blue, like it grabbed a piece of the rainbow and kept it to wear. Even trying to […]

What the Unvaccinated Can Teach Us

    The unvaccinated have been called stupid, selfish, dangerous, everything, as my mother used to say, but children of God, which, of course, whatever else they are, they are that too. Their disobedience casts a shadow that makes the virtue and rationality of the vaccinated shine all the more brightly. This reminds me of […]

How Your Best Friend Turned Anti-Vaxx

      For months now, I have been asking the same two questions. How can so many people be opposed to a vaccine that could save their lives and those of their loved ones? And how dare they justify increasing the risk of infecting someone else? Frustrated to the point of fury, I take […]

Not “Nice”

          “That’s the problem with Midwesterners!” explodes my intensely creative, less than patient friend. “They think nice is a thing. Nice is just passive-aggressive.” Wait—nice is not a thing? Not a virtue to which we must aspire? Not the sweet lubricant that allows us to function in community? That would be […]

The Midwest’s Lascaux Is Up for Auction

    An artist held out drawings of the rock art in Picture Cave. In its pitch-black depths, beneath a woodsy, remote part of Warren County, Missouri, the cave had walls covered in red and black pictographs. Carol Diaz-Granados, who was working on a doctoral dissertation about Missouri’s American Indian rock art, stared for a […]

My Guilty Adoration of Veronica Mars

    I tried a few light mentions, name-checking her with the diffidence I reserve for any opinion that might be dorkier than I realize. “Who?” “Oh, yeah. Never watched that.” Crushed, I shut up. Nobody was going to share a grown woman’s sudden, overwhelming love for a long-ago teenage tv show that felt like […]