Screenshot from the trailer for ‘Julia,’ Sony Pictures The new documentary Julia works to explain why Julia Child still matters culturally, both as the first TV-chef icon and as a feminist who paved the way in two sexist fields: professional cooking and media. The film is directed…
Still from ‘The Beatles: Get Back,’ Disney+ I was in high school when Star Trek: The Motion Picture premiered. It was the first Star Trek film, and the first fix for fans since the TV show had ended a decade before. I was never much of a fan…
IFC Films has released a new documentary on Kurt Vonnegut, co-directed by Robert Weide, who in the process of filming Vonnegut over decades created a close relationship with the writer. The film traces this connection, even as it shows Weide’s failure to make his original conception of the documentary—for 40 years.
Photos by John Griswold As it rounded a corner in a parking lot at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, the Dymaxion Car made a nostalgic sound, throaty and hardworking. Its engine, a 1933 Ford Flathead V-8, has been described as one of the 10 best engines of the…
Photo courtesy Missouri History Museum All kids are tuned to difference, since it means survival. But when you grow up poor you become acutely aware that some people have the means to change things, even in small ways, but do not. Discouraged by the enormity of the problem,…
Screenshot from the trailer for ‘No Time to Die,’ from MGM and Eon Productions What do I get for predicting that James Bond would still be looking over his shoulder in retirement, and despite his heroic adventures would feel only fatigue and purposelessness? None of that was…
Flight deck of ‘USS Okinawa’ during the evacuation of Saigon, April 1975. Courtesy U.S. Marine Corps History website I am not in the habit of writing paeans to war machines, but the prototype of the UH-1 Huey helicopter flew for the first time 65 years ago this month,…
Cartoonist and writer Bill Mauldin. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-127496 The Oath Keepers, a militia group, is (still) in the news, as the Department of Justice and the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol continue…
The wreck of the ‘USS Inaugural,’ October 21, 2021 Every few years the Mississippi at St. Louis drops enough to reveal the wreck of a WWII minesweeper, the USS Inaugural, lying in a few feet of water, next to the Missouri shore. How it came to be there…
Photo by John Griswold Of course a city garbage truck—big, dangerous, smelly—was the big hit at the local Touch a Truck event today, and both kids and parents enthused over it. My younger son had volunteered to help staff the event, and it was one of our first…