How Pee Could Save the Planet

By Jeannette Cooperman

Peecycling could replace at least 25 percent of the commercial fertilizer used worldwide. And the advantages are stunning. First, it is cheaper. Second, peecycling keeps the urine out of the groundwater.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

Songs About Cities and Urban Life, Part II

By Ben Fulton

Songs and music give tangible form to the invisible by making the invisible audible, and therefore visible in our hearts and minds. Listening to music, we travel through the human soul. Hopefully, the following songs and music give ample space only to some of the best songs of all time.

Essays

Espionage in the Midwest

By Jeannette Cooperman

Economic espionage takes place with increasing frequency, part of the 700-plus China-related counterintelligence investigations the FBI now launches every year. But because the United States has an open market and laws protecting privacy, individual liberty, and the global collaborations of our corporations and universities, economic espionage is incredibly hard to prove and prosecute.

Society & Culture | Dispatches

Who Even Whistles Anymore?

By Jeannette Cooperman

A whistled melody always sounds carefree. Or maybe people are likelier to whistle when they are happy? When you are sad it is hard to summon the breath. But there is also whistling to while away tedious work; whistling to work up courage; whistling in the dark, of which there is a lot these days.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

Stormwater: The Sexy New Design Challenge

By Jeannette Cooperman

The age of conquest is over. Today’s zigzag of droughts and deluges is forcing us to see water more humbly.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

What the Black Exodus Says About Us

By Jeannette Cooperman

Nobody in the U.S. government is even counting the Black people who are emigrating, let alone seeing them as refugees. That would make us look like the countries we prefer to deride.

Uncategorized | Dispatches

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

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