Photo by John Griswold A “votercade” was held in St. Louis on Saturday, in support of the National John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Action Day. The national event was to “to demand preservation and expansion of voting rights,” by “mobilizing to pass the For the People Act,…
Photo by Craig McLachlan on Unsplash Followers of the prosperity gospel worship the power of positive thinking—above all, the puritan faith that they are preordained for prosperity—and are comically impious as a result. “Expect great things and great things will come,” said Norman Vincent Peale, friend and counselor…
Still from Navy Video by Mass Communications Specialist 1st Class Patrick Enright/Released When I was training to be a military diver, the school’s cadre often ran us out to the beach to run in formation through the loose sand of the dunes, because it was said to be…
Photo by John Griswold The Union Miners’ Cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois, was quiet on a recent Thursday afternoon. It sits a quarter-mile south of one of the remaining stretches of old Route 66, in a town of two thousand. The cemetery is filled with German, Italian, and Eastern…
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels Say a universal income was instituted, or you won the lottery, or were lucky enough to find a job that paid you to do what you enjoyed. What would you do if all your basic financial needs were met? My mom used…
Photo by cottonbro from Pexels. A new report from Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs warns of dangers from Artificial Intelligence (AI) unlike those from androids in dystopian science-fiction movies. This AI, the report’s author, Bruce Schneier, explains, is disembodied, specific to certain tasks, unpredictable,…
Mark Twain was a Confederate soldier for two weeks, but his unit of Missouri irregulars disbanded in part because they heard a Union colonel was sweeping through northern Missouri with a regiment to destroy them all. The colonel was Ulysses S. Grant.
I have been reading with interest the new book Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty (Oxford UP), by Mark Robert Rank, Lawrence M. Eppard, and Heather E. Bullock. (Rank is a professor in the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis.)…
Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian InstitutionCC0 When my first collection of essays was coming out a few years ago, a friend asked me to write down what I had learned about the process of assembling and editing the book, which was different from writing a novel or…
Artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, reacts to the amount his art sold for at auction in this screenshot from Christie’s YouTube channel. Something important has happened in the art world: the possibility of exclusive ownership of digital art, by blockchain technology. As with Bitcoin, a digital “certificate…