Courtesy Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 ee
I was in the library when I heard the young man talking on the phone:
“I got our one-billion-dollar lottery ticket, so I feel like we have to be prepared. ‘What would you do?’ my wife asked me, but to…
In the Halloweens of my day, in a defunct little coal town in the Midwest, we had a hell of a good time.
Behind the scenes of ‘True Grit’ with the Coens, by Jeff Bridges, courtesy of the artist
I have always been a fan of Jeff Bridges’ acting but was surprised to learn this week he is an accomplished art photographer and sculptor whose work has appeared in Premiere and Aperture…
Courtesy Self-Storage, Wikimedia Commons
In storage lockers we offshore the domestic. We place there the things that will not fit in our homes, until they can be brought in from the cold. It is not direct metaphor, but something more like signal or sign, that the often unheated…
Courtesy Fantagraphics Books
Steve Brodner’s Living & Dying in America: A Daily Chronicle, 2020-2022, is a fascinating and unusual graphic memoir. In the book’s 476 pages, Brodner has captured the feel of the first two Covid years by drawing one image every evening from that day. These range…
Mississippi River, steamboat, dinner cruise, St. Louis, waterfront, excursion
The memorial service for Joan Didion, who died December 23, 2021, was held this week at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. (You can watch it here. There is no audio during the slideshow at the start.) Organizers explained the…
You may be surprised to hear that St. Louis is an excellent place for a fall hike. But that is because St. Louis and its surrounding areas are full of surprises.
Anaerobic bacteria, courtesy the CDC/Gilda Jones
A multinational corporation was investing in environmental initiatives, and I hoped to write about them. Their main project was highly technical; for background they had me email two university scientists. The scientists could not easily explain to a layman what they did,…
Photo by John Griswold
On a trip to the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis this summer, a wonderful thing happened: my younger son suddenly thought of something he would like for his birthday. My kids do not want things, usually, which makes holiday gift-giving difficult, so I…