Prettying Up the Manhattan Project

By Jeannette Cooperman

Activist Denise Brock, who singlehandedly made it possible for more than 6,500 St. Louis uranium workers (or their widows) to receive $200 million in compensation, now has horrific medical issues herself.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

An Opera That Ought to Terrify Us

By Jeannette Cooperman

The world premiere of "Awakenings" at the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis was powerfully moving, and so were its three backstories.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

A Film Crew’s Wistful Take on the Midwest

By Jeannette Cooperman

When the crew arrived, tumbling out of a giant van, they thanked us for opening our home. Fair enough; we seldom clean. But they kept talking about our home, which is cozy but hardly striking.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

Down The Mean Streets of St. Louis

By Gerald Early

What makes Little Brother important and a must-read certainly for St. Louisans is its powerful account of a slice of Black life in our region, a vivid picture of the good and the beautiful and the bad and the ugly of North County, a life cordoned off from the rest of St. Louis as if it were a leper colony. Westhoff’s account of the families, the male bravado, the petty crime, the violence, the art and aesthetic of its rap culture, all of this is worth the price of the book. For what Westhoff reveals is the vast profundity buried in the absurdity of Black urban life that also reveals the inadequacy, hypocrisy, and flawed nature of White bourgeois life.

Reviews

The O. J. Simpson Trial as the Rorschach Test of the Decline of American Culture

By Michael A. Kahn

In Bailey’s version of the trial—as the subtitle of his book declares—he was the master strategist and courtroom impresario while Robert Shapiro was the bumbling and increasingly envious knucklehead who blew the preliminary hearing, believed O.J.’s best option was to seek a plea deal to manslaughter, and, when he learned that the jury had reached a verdict, made a panicked call to Alan Dershowitz to prepare the appeal.

Reviews

The Poet as Trail Guide to a Kind of Truth, We Think

By Eddie Silva

The poet is the kind of trail guide to whom you ask, “How did we get here?” You may retrace your steps to find an answer, although you are more likely to find other questions, or step onto other trails you had not observed before.

Reviews

My Mother the Book

By John Griswold

Her strength was both poise and pose, and her independence had to be on her own terms, because no one else cared about her terms but me. She had no standing, within a few years of my birth, socially, financially, professionally, or personally. Truth is, she may have felt a kind of freedom in not working for years, not having to deal with people, puttering in her ruined house and curating her family junk.

Essays

The Thunder and Gold of Horses Running Free

By Jeannette Cooperman

We have used horses to do our work, fight our battles, race for us, carry us. It is the few that still run wild, though, that send a thrill down our spines. We have no claim on them, yet a long and regrettable history has placed us in a position where we must “manage” them. Now, like newlyweds, we have to learn how to be part of their lives without changing who they are.

Essays

Aspic, Really?

By Jeannette Cooperman

Within its cool glop sit pieces of meat or fish, eggs or veggies. The original idea was to preserve them, sealing out air and bacteria. A liver pate, for example, turns crusty when exposed to air, but encase it in aspic and it will stay as fresh as a mummy.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

There Be Demons

By Jeannette Cooperman

In modernity, that external force crawled into our skull; we speak of inner demons, including addictions, compulsions, and voices of doom or self-mockery. The shift is not as dramatic as it seems: in the second century, Clement of Alexandria was already noting how easily we can be possessed by our own appetites.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

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