On one side of the river, an ancient civilization that has never lost its hold on our imagination. On the other, a faded, self-defeating city that could have been so much more. St. Louisans live in a place caught between past and possibility, and lately, that tension is inspiring novelists. After reading […]
The orchestral arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky’s great piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition (1874) is a staple of youth symphonies all over the United States. Or, at least it was when I was young enough to play in the Utah Youth Symphony. A smorgasbord of orchestral colors spread across an index of […]
The recent brouhaha—an insufficiently flippant term—over the criminal case recently dismissed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, accusing three men of stealing handwritten pages of lyrics by the Eagles has it all. Ever since it was filed in 2022 this case has been shoved into the headlines by boring egos and sloppy […]
“How are you?” Could any question be paler, more flaccid? Your answer must either be terse—“Fine,” a breezy dismissal of every way in which you are not fine—or rambling and digressive, because the question spans your entire existence. Humans are, in many ways, all the time, until the body’s clock stops and we […]
A Russian acquaintance I will call Ivan, the Head Supervisor of Cultural Education at a state cultural site, was kind to me and a friend on our trip to Russia in 2014. Since then, Ivan and I have exchanged greetings by email a few times a year. “Merry Christmas to you and […]
“The kids were sitting there going ‘Bah, Meh, Duh,’” groans a retired reading teacher, explaining that the pendulum of teaching theory has swung yet again. The way she learned, which fanned the love of reading and presented whole words for kids to gobble up, has given way to “the science of reading,” which […]
It can be confusing to civilians that the branches of the U.S. military (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Coast Guard, and now Space Force) have different but often overlapping missions. Branches often train together in the field and cross-train in each other’s schools. I served in the Army, for example, but […]
The march of great voices through time and fashion is arguably as revealing about our culture as what we consider great art and architecture. But while art and architecture are so often shared communally in museums and public places, an abiding passion for certain voices has the unique quality of being both […]
Done right, philosophy is as charming, irritating, and deliberately provocative as a toddler asking, “But why? Why? Why?” Yet too often it is presented only in rigid black letters, a gray page of text stripped of imagination, the ideas a strain to visualize. Becky Moon intends to change that. She started as a […]
This is what it is like to be a layperson in the Years of COVID. “So my primary care doc said the vaccine loses effectiveness after six months.” “That’s what my pharmacist said, too. But nobody’s saying anything about a new booster.” “If you’re healthy, you don’t need a booster anyway, right?” “But I […]
