Adult Education in the Pandemic

Screen shot of photographer Greg Williams at work.     There are online classes or sessions of all kinds these days, such as The Great Courses (“Learn at your own pace with no schedule, while exercising, commuting, or just relaxing. Just you and the world’s greatest professors!”); TED…

The Ad Hoc Tribes of Violence

  Image capture of video on social media, showing a concerted group climbing the Capitol stairs. As law enforcement and amateur Internet sleuths continue to identify those who stormed Congress on Wednesday, some are poring over video of a “disciplined” group in tactical gear, who walk single-file, hand on…

Why Did the Morons Cross the Threshold?

Photo by Jose M. via Unsplash Because they could. And because there was precedent. No, not the British, who burned the US Capitol Building along with most of official Washington, DC, in 1814. This comparison is pertinent mostly only because yesterday’s event was “the first time a malicious group…

Slow the Roll

As he tooled along, his car turned over 100,000 miles. He was a guy who had a car with a 100,000 miles on it. He had a lot of miles on him too. He wondered how many that would be, briefly tried to do the math.

The Mosquitoes of Winter

Thank goodness for the Christmas tree, bringer of joy and emotional warmth, driven down on a truck from Mississippi or North Carolina. Its tiny lights and ornaments collected for decades infuse the subtropical house with seasonal cheer, even if you can see the warm, wet road and piles of hurricane debris past it through the windows.

After the Hurricanes, the Holidays

The Capital One tower in Lake Charles, Louisiana, still missing most of its glass after the hurricanes.     It is 72 degrees and raining again in Lake Charles. It has been raining off and on for days. There is an ongoing mosquito infestation, despite two US Air Force…

Pathetic ‘Mischief’: 3 Figures of the Alt-Right

Richard Spencer at his mother’s house in Whitefish, Montana, in a scene from ‘White Noise.’     The Atlantic’s first documentary, White Noise, is directed by Daniel Lombroso, who also did the camera work. It was Lombroso who captured the images in 2016 of white nationalist Richard Spencer (“a…

Love and Stuff, an Auto-Documentary

Photo courtesy of MPRM Communications.     Judith Helfand’s newest film, Love and Stuff, puts the past in conversation with the present, and the results are moving. Helfand is known for socially-engaged films such as Blue Vinyl, an Emmy-nominated documentary about health risks from the PVC industry, and Cooked: Survival…

New Film on Wuhan at the Start of Pandemic

A screenshot from the new documentary ’76 Days.’   A new documentary shows some of what those in Wuhan, China, faced in the early days of the pandemic. 76 Days , funded in part by the Sundance Institute and the Ford Foundation, is being distributed by MTV Documentary Films.

John O’Brien in Action

John O’Brien, the head of the much-admired Dalkey Archive Press, has died. Here is a piece I wrote in December 2009, after a visit to the Press, when it was located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. O’Brien was in his element. —JG  …

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