Jeannette Cooperman

    Toes wriggling in warm sand, grass cool underfoot, release from tight suffocating leather… I have always loved being barefoot. In the years when I bothered with pretty shoes, I slipped them off the minute I reached the office. I was nicknamed, no doubt with a few eye rolls, the barefoot contessa, and my […]

    Ever since I saw the big yellow diapered-baby Trump balloon floating on a London parade—no, before that, when he declared his entry into politics from a gold escalator—Donald Trump has been a caricature to me. Two-dimensional, crudely drawn, bold and garish, demanding attention but not consideration. This is partly my recoil but largely […]

    Friends have typical bucket lists—climbing Everest, running the Boston Marathon, seeing Venice before it sinks—but my future recently cleared, distilling itself into a single aim. I want to become a curmudgeon. A blazing act of defiance, this. Cleveland Amory once noted that “being a curmudgeon was the last thing in the world that […]

    Why is it that it is always the humanities some tiny group of monks, scribes, or scholars has to try to save? Humanities. Do we hate ourselves that much? Philosopher Joel Uili sums up the irony: “They’ll tell you that the arts and humanities aren’t practical and then read poetry at funerals and […]

Seneca said we each dwell in two communities: the place of our birth, and the community that “is truly great and truly common, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun.” I would far rather be a citizen of the world than, by accident of birth, an American. I feel disloyal writing this.

    The voice comes from over my shoulder, cheery but somehow grating, exhorting me to buy some sort of frozen slurpy drink. It rattles on, touting slurpy wonders, as I try to fill my Mini in peace. Ads that were once trapped inside TVs or stuck to paper now fly through the air, aimed […]

    When I think of national parks, I think of craggy iced mountains, hot geysers, and drippy, haunting everglade swamps in a slow canoe. Mike Bezemek, writer and outdoorsman, thinks of mysteries. Some natural—how did an Indiana sand dune swallow a little boy? Some historic, or mythic. And quite a few tinged with sinister […]

    On one of Ezra Klein’s recent podcasts, Kathryn Schulz remarked on the difference between what our grandparents complained about, what our parents complained about, what we complain about. I hit pause and thought a minute. My grandmother’s tongue was razor-sharp, but she did more criticizing than complaining. There is, trust me, a subtle […]

    “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”~Viktor Frankl   A friend, retired, keeps busy—pickleball, book clubs, t’ai chi—and stays aware and concerned about current events. But the other day she blurted that she envies our friends who had children, because their lives had a guaranteed […]

    The dog will be good for days on end, staying within the invisible boundaries of our fenceless yard and reappearing in a reasonable time at the side porch door. Then something snaps inside him, and a minute after I let him out, a black streak fast as a panther cuts a diagonal to […]

    I just keep letting my technology fail. Our ancient TV is so blurred, I cannot read the plot summaries from the sofa, and I have to get up anyway, because the remote is not fully functional. My car has gone wonky, so that airbag warnings appear now and then (random, unwarranted) and block […]

    On Friday, May 16, the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s crews were hammering away in the glen, preparing the set for the following week’s tech rehearsals. Phones buzzed a warning just in time for people to take cover. A minute later, gale-force wind whipped through the glen and knocked all their work asunder. Tom […]

    When someone in my book club chose Their Eyes Were Watching God as our next book, I was startled. I had not thought of that novel since grad school. But I dove back in, through the thicket of phonetic dialogue that today would be verboten, and found Janie all over again. Talk about […]

Qusay Hussein Al-Mamari gives advice regularly: so much was so hard for him, and he knows how to make it easier for other people. “Whatever you are going through, say, ‘Everything has an ending.’ We have a date to die, our food expires, a building will one day collapse. So whatever situation you’re in, it will have an ending. One day, it will be over. So there is no need to stress about life. And for any person who does not see that life is beautiful, please do not make it hard on other people.”

    After a two-hour conversation with a funny, literate Irishman on What’sApp and an interview with a young artist who uses ancient myths to inform his work, I finished the day exhilarated. This is what I have always loved most about reporting: the great conversations it makes possible. You live too much in your […]

    Remember all those earnest dismantling-racism workshops? They went about it all wrong. They should have set race and guilt and privilege aside and asked participants to think of alternative uses for a brick. That is not entirely facetious. In The Ideological Brain, neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod cites research based on the Alternative Uses Test, […]

    In the glorious fifties, that yearned-for destination of MAGA time travelers, my mother’s gynecologist prescribed Valium for her nerves. As a kid, I watched her slowly, shakily, pry herself free of them. It took years. In her seventies, the anxiety came back full force, so she nibbled tiny pieces of the lowest dose […]

    After our entire book club, with unprecedented unanimity, pronounced Cutting for Stone the best book we had read yet, we waited twelve long years. Every few months, one of us would ask, “Hey, has Verghese written his next book yet?” Finally, The Covenant of Water came out. The man is a consummate storyteller. […]

    The last time I studied a language, it was high-school French taught by a elderly nun with a Texan accent who promised a class on “erotic cultures” when she meant “exotic.” Duolingo is definitely cooler, and almost as much fun as that snorting, tittering class. But the Spanish itself is driving me crazy. […]

    After months of deft interrogation and feedback, a friend of mine has his Chat GPT AI trained like Rin Tin Tin, sensitive to his tone of voice, eager to help him think through thorny problems. He sends me one of their conversations—which I promptly misunderstand. Here is an excerpt. First, my friend—who works […]

    The dog runs around my car as I pull into the drive, so I slam on the brakes and skid across the gravel. My husband jogs up, lead in hand. They were about to go for what we wryly call a Daddywalk, meaning a brisk, military-style, one-two-one-two (or would it be two-four?) exercise […]

    The first episode was over, but I stayed on the edge of the ottoman, where I had moved to make sure I heard every word. My arms were folded tightly against the pain. Yet the next evening, I was eager to watch the next episode. I had waited to watch Adolescence, put off […]

    One of this year’s William G. Ferguson lectures at WashU had a doozy of a title: “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.” I had wondered. Both the loathing and the love felt too extreme to be organic. But I had never dug as […]

If someone you love dies, there will be nothing more tenderly, heartbreakingly intimate than their oldest pair of sneakers. Shoes that dashed them through rainstorms, won and lost games, bounced with eager impatience, knotted stubborn in airport security lines. They have been stretched and pounded into a shape no manufacturer ever envisioned. They smell of sweat and earth and freedom.

    Over Easter weekend, my husband and I are in New Harmony, Indiana, celebrating our anniversary. Friday afternoon, Andrew wants a nap. I am restless. “I’m gonna do the Cross Walk,” I tell him, envisioning an architectural tour of the seven churches in town. Instead, I find myself in the middle of a deeply […]

    The Victorians sealed their houses against winter’s bluster, then flung open the windows in spring and aired out all the coal dust, swept out the soot, laundered and pressed the bedlinens, sparkled up the windows, and let the sunshine stream in. The catharsis appeals; the work does not. I tend to befriend our […]

    On the campus of Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, you will spot an unusual, beautiful shape in the distance. A geodesic dome, set apart from the main buildings, and somehow beckoning. This is the Center for Spirituality & Sustainability, designed (in partnership with architect Shoji Sadao) by Buckminster Fuller, back when he was on the […]

A journalist friend emails: “I’m not sure what to make of Pamela Paul’s decision (assuming she wasn’t forced out).” I stare at the message for a second, thinking only: who is Pamela Paul? A New York Times columnist, it turns out—and I subscribe. But lazily. I write back, saying that after skimming Paul’s goodbye column, […]

    Weird, that this global-trade-war market-crash thing feels a lot like five years ago. The cause is entirely different, yet I am feeling exactly the same disorientation and stomach-clenching fear I felt with the spread of COVID-19. And, given the abruptness, magnitude, and destructive power of the change, the same vertigo. There is a […]

    This is not the story of a sweet, smart, oft-maligned breed of dog, the sort of dog you would expect to find curled at the feet of an expat in 1930s Paris. A dog with a sometimes wry, sometimes goofy sense of humor; a dog who would rather do tricks than hunt rats, […]

    Curious about the psyches of two well-known men—their names are not necessary—I ask Chat GPT 4 to pretend it is their psychiatrist and analyze them. Which personality, I want to know, is darker? I am not even sure what I mean by “darker.” More malevolent in intent? Capable of doing more damage? The […]

      Last week, I was on a panel. This, for me, is the equivalent of a tax audit, triggering raw, unwarranted terror. I did my usual stupid thing: wrote out all my answers to the posed questions and tried to memorize them. Then the organizer encouraged us to ad lib, go off script, […]

    I came of age walking around Northwest Plaza, a then-novel “outdoor mall” with a pebbly version of cobblestones and several courtyard fountains so hypnotic I had their shapes memorized. By “came of age,” I mean that I became a person who made her own choices. Not the early Montessori choices my mom cribbed […]

To new generations, the secrecy of the past is often baffling. A secret is a woman laced so tightly into her velvet gown that she cannot breathe or speak. We show up in jeans. Carl Jung called secrets “psychic poison”: they isolate the keeper of the secret, require lies, breed distrust, and become the unwanted inheritance of a generation bewildered by the need to keep them.

    Finally, I was honest. Forty years of trying not to be, and all it took was a glass of wine and friends I hoped would understand. They were asking what I thought of the new building fondly known as The Cheese Grater, aka The Pineapple. Our host had written a warm letter of […]

    A loud curse from upstairs, vibrating the air like a tolled bell. The dog looks at me, alarmed. “Oh, don’t worry,” I say. “That’s just Daddy.” Punching a hole through his cuff buttonhole with a pen because it is Monday morning, he is about to be late to teach a class, and everyday […]

    After fussing with his back leg, the dog turned to look at me, eyes wide with panic. I bent to check and found a bright yellow plastic fish with four wicked-sharp hooks dangling, three of them now hopelessly tangled in Willie’s coat. Somebody must have dropped it in the alley. I begged him […]

    Elon Musk’s fourteenth child was born last month. The names of the previous thirteen are deliberately unusual words charged with personal significance for their papa. The fourteenth’s name is Seldon Lycurgus. Seldon, for Hari Seldon, a mathematician in Isaac Asimov’s science fiction Foundations series. First Minister of the Empire, he develops a new […]

    Say you are learning English, and you are trying to figure out what “gut” means. Ah, a beer belly. But who would equate a beer belly with courage? Then your doctor talks about your gut, which is hardly distended, or brave; he seems to refer to coiled innards. Yet a bratty bully yells […]

    A dreary spring day, cold and wet, is what I remember. And standing, nervous, at the edge of a scraggly “crowd” of about twelve people. We were in Saint Louis U.’s quad, and this was my first (and almost last) protest. Something about hostages in Iraq? God help me, I cannot remember. All […]

     There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to hang out with people who are like you. There is nothing wrong with wanting to live near them, work with them, and party with them. The problems start when the similarity is a stark, flat-out category with a history of larger discrimination, and people try […]

    Oh, hell, the recipe calls for a can of tomatoes. No worries, there’s one in the basement. I’ll just go down and—wait, I should bring up the dog treats while I—there’s that tax folder. Better move it so I remember to file this year’s backup and—did I get Andrew to sign that form? […]

No editor would let a resurrected Tom Wolfe write the way he once did. But it was that breathless spew, uncensored though artful, that let him reach us. Now we only get that much animation from rogue or ranting podcasters and columnists, and it comes soaked in instantly recognizable political bias.

    “Everything is connected,” we often remind one another, nodding wisely—but with no idea of the implications. Not until the end of the twentieth century did we realize that the immune system’s inflammatory response plays a central role in anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, MS and other auto-immune diseases, Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, Parkinson’s, […]

        I had not been to Plaza Frontenac in quite some time, except to scurry in the Saks end to see a movie without pop or popcorn. For some sad, unfathomable reason, they no longer make concessions. And neither do the stores. My mom and I used to go to Frontenac regularly, […]

  The world knows Howard Nemerov as twice the U.S. Poet Laureate, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, a distinguished professor and poet-in-residence at Washington University for twenty-one years—and a bit of an enigma. A stylist impatient with literary pretension; a deep thinker who held up wit and irony […]

    Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. A simple idea, the core of Christianity and every other world religion. I remember parroting it as a kid. Later I realized it instilled equity—all human persons have the same value, and no one should be treated as somehow less than you. […]

  His is not an easy name to forget. Selam Deutschmann. There is a story behind it. His partner’s first name is Eritrea, which was her heritage but not yet a nation when she was born. There is a story there, too. Selam Deutschmann is a chiropractor, Eritrea Habtemariam a nurse practitioner. They live in […]

    Last week, even a Martian could have heard the buzz of anticipation in WashU’s Graham Chapel. Its pews were smooshed with an overflow audience eager to hear Tim Alberta, staff writer for The Atlantic, make sense of something we have struggled with for a decade: how to reconcile Christian support for a president […]

    “You know you have a crack in this back molar?” the hygienist asks, poking with a sharp thing. “Um…no?” She nods briskly, insists on showing me with a little mirror. “Wwwhat do we do about that?” I ask, using the plural to comfort myself. They are my team, right? We are all invested […]

    Growing up, I shunned anything shaped like a heart, anything ruffled or bedazzled, anything pink. In the first two instances, my antipathy holds—unless the heart holds Godiva chocolates. But my own heart does a secret leap, like a kid embarrassed to love ballet and practicing in an empty room, whenever I find myself […]

Prayer attempts to control—or at least come to peace with—the uncontrollable. It is an aspiration but also an assent: you are believing in something, acknowledging something, hoping for something. You have given shape to what is amorphous and uncertain. Psychologically, prayer is a survival tactic.

        The geranium is a Bette Midler sort, with a blowsy inflorescence of clustered pink blossoms tinged with pale orange. Irrepressible, she has stayed in full bloom since we brought her home more than a year ago. The New Guinea impatiens is just the opposite, a Maria Callas diva haughty about her […]

    In the only recorded inter-species war in human history, the humans lost. Meet the victor. Skinny, leggy, frizzy-haired and feathered, with a long, pale blue neck, buggy amber eyes, and wings too short to fly. Instead, they flap when the emu runs, spindly legs blurring at thirty miles per hour. Emus may not […]

    To know someone you love died trapped, their body scorched and melted by wildfire? To stand and watch a home that has been your sanctuary for thirty years burn to the ground? To then comb through the rubble and find nothing you can salvage, or worse, see an album of wedding photos so […]

    Awful, that I had forgotten all about Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, wife of John F. Kennedy Jr. and killed alongside him in that horrific plane crash. She was thirty-three years old. Also stunning, and a former publicist for Calvin Klein. Now I read that in one of fashion’s weird spirals, she has become, posthumously, a […]

Hope changes form as we age. We are no longer hoping for new things or adventures or lovers or careers. We are not “living for” any particular cause or project. We are simply living. Hope is now a compact with the universe: a resolve to keep trying, keep giving, keep reaching out. So when the world tells us it would rather we die already, that we are about to become a great deal of bother, why would we not bow out gracefully?

      When Stephen Sondheim flew into town to accept the St. Louis Literary Award, my friend Lana Pepper, then president of the organization bestowing the prize, planned a dinner for him. Upon learning that Sondheim only drank vodka, Lana, the quintessential host, drove all over town in a frenzy, because the only vodka […]

    It starts with a scritching noise that, like a demonic possession, seems to be coming from inside the walls. Then, anticlimax: we find a scattering of dark brown droppings in the bathroom cabinet. We are only dealing with Satan’s small gray minions. Andrew picks up a shredded pile of white cotton: “What’s this?” […]

    A quarter-century ago, Wendell Berry suggested that if we aim to rescue our planet, “we are using the wrong language.” Our terms are scientific, expert, analytical—but also cold, and often vague. “As a result we have a lot of genuinely concerned people calling upon us to ‘save’ a world which their language simultaneously […]

    Grinning, I requested Want, Gillian Anderson’s collection of women’s anonymous sexual fantasies, from our all-knowing small-town library. Why not? If a few were especially intriguing, I could read them aloud to my husband in a husky voice…. He saw the book on the kitchen table and snuck it away the next time he […]

    A traditional Roman Catholic confessional looks as heavy as sin itself, the dark wood carved deep. You enter and kneel, but the kneeler never has quite enough room for your knees, which throws you off balance from the start. Velvet curtains rustle, then the metal grate slides open: God is listening. God, through […]

          I recognize the email address; this guy has written to me periodically over the years, either to share outrage over some social injustice, add a little insight, or offer warm concern. Now, for the first time, he is the one in trouble: he says he is about to be evicted […]

    I am fussing over the slavering contributions to Trump’s inaugural fund—especially the millions forked over by CEOs who are unlikely, in the privacy of their suites, to even deem him presidential. “Is everything pay-to-play now?” I exclaim. The silence of the newspaper that broke Watergate can now be bought, and the giants of […]

    Who needs a time machine? I look out the window and see snow falling, and I am five again. Excited as the snow deepens, thrilled (still) to play in it, cozy in front of a fire afterward. The adult in me loves the way snow covers an often ugly world with pure loveliness—white […]

    In A French Village, when her son is killed by a German bomb, a man tells the keening mother to “Be dignified.” I would slap him, but instead she pulls herself together. In a later episode, a young woman is fired from her job as a maid because she is Jewish. She turns […]

    The fabric is Scottish broadcloth, a white as warm as the sunlit cathedral stone. The colors have the pure brilliance of the stained glass. The design is clean, strong, and radiant; I cannot imagine anything more joyful. Or riskier. In a time when many Catholics are growing more conservative, the Archbishop of Paris […]

      When we moved into our house, a friend took in the black wrought iron fence, the house set well back from its perimeter, and grinned. “The Munsters.” Our haunting, though, took the form of rust. And because somewhere beneath the layers of black Rustoleum was an embossed date in the 1800s, we […]

    If you asked me, I would say I am not a perfectionist. I know this because I am so painfully aware of how many times I screw up or fall short, and how much is always left to do…. Oliver Burkeman does not share my denial, but he does share my compulsions—to do […]

    Spoilers throughout. Deserved spoilers, maybe even a tad vengeful, because Playground humbled me on so many levels at once. First and most happily, Richard Powers’s descriptions of the strange, almost unfathomable beauty beneath the sea are the most lyrical and engaging I have ever read. As a boy, he wanted to be an […]

    Sneak a peek at the palette of an artist. It will be far more interesting, and revealing, than peering inside their medicine cabinet at a party. In The Artist’s Palette, Alexandra Loske, a British-German art historian, demonstrates the game, describing fifty idiosyncratic selections and arrangements of colors, then showing us the art that […]

A marriage must be flexible. One is strong while the other flags, then you meet in the middle and run parallel for a while, then the music stops and you switch, fast as a game of musical chairs.

    Weeks ago, the sweet family across the street put up their festive holiday lights. The house on the corner followed, then three more houses, all before I had even managed to order a Thanksgiving turkey. I curse the lights. Typically American, I mutter, meaning of course U.S. American, where we are so arrogant […]

    The three-martini lunch, once standard, turned scandalous in the seventies, hastily replaced by light beer and wine coolers. Then came a defiant resurgence of glam cocktails and cigar bars, followed by a wave of sober-curious shaming, and then the triumphant redemption of red wine as healthful. Which was followed—while the applause still roared—by […]

    When I edited a city magazine, a smartass friend suggested a department called Why So Ugly? There would be no shortage of examples from the built environment. Big boxes, glass towers, strip malls—it is as though a child drew these shapes, then crafted them from whatever cheap stuff was close at hand and […]

    I used to read about regimes in other countries where anything unfavorable to those in power was erased, burned, rewritten. The Chinese Communist Party, which pronounced any negative events or criticism “historical nihilism.” Joseph Stalin, who rewrote Russian history before he began his purges. Afghanistan, which plucked forty years of the country’s life […]

    Kamala Harris’s concession speech was, pundits on both sides agreed, “graceful.” The compliment is a tad gendered; men are seldom described as graceful, though they certainly can be. But brush that aside, because this country stands in desperate need of grace. And that holds true across all of the word’s possible definitions: forgiveness, […]

    I, you, he, she, it, we, they, them, us, him, her, his, hers, its, theirs, ours, yours. Strike them from your (this is hard already) vocabulary. A radical suggestion, but it came to me with some urgency when I pieced together all the harm they do. First, my Jewish husband said, “I support […]

  The tension in our usually placid household has been ratcheting up for days now. My stomach is tight; my husband’s blood sugar keeps spiking. We read each other the latest political outrage and talk nervously about the unrest we fully expect. What will happen in our sweet little town, a place where the majority […]

    My assignment (this was years ago) was to profile Archbishop Justin Rigali. A shy, diffident man who had zero desire to talk to the press. Frantic for insight, I did the usual sharklike circling, interviewing everyone I could find who knew him well. But the most helpful interview was with John Padberg, a […]

    My only trip to Paris was a three-day whirlwind many years ago. With no time for the Louvre, I went instead to the Rodin Museum—and fell in love. The white roses climbing a stone wall outside the entrance; the stillness inside, despite the crowd; sunlight streaming through floor-to-ceiling arched windows, lighting the sculptures’ […]

    Climbing to the fourth floor of Saint Louis University’s Verhaegen Hall, we dragged chairs into a tight circle in Belden Lane’s dusty, book-lined office and unpacked wine, cheese, crackers, apples. Then we spent an hour or two talking about what we were writing, wanting to write, thinking about, wondering. Three men, two women, […]

        Thoughts are pricy these days; a penny will only buy ambivalence. Should our nation’s tiniest coin be preserved or officially abandoned? It has shaped our figurative language, our notions of thrift, our attitudes toward money. Yet we are a practical people, and it costs well over one cent to mint a […]

    “A respected novelist while alive, in death Bolaño has soared to cult status.” Whoever wrote that for Newsweek was not exaggerating. Though Roberto Bolaño’s name does not glide off most Midwestern tongues, those who know his work are fervent in their praise. Now Picador intends to expand that cult by reissuing Bolaño’s books, […]

    Friends give me tiny Eiffel towers, and my husband knows he is safe if he buys me any object, garment, wine, or pastry said to be French. I have always been drawn to French culture, by which I of course mean French literature, art, music, and philosophy—but mainly, because I am a shallow […]

As soon as you can reach high, grab the shiny doorknob, and toddle outside, you see what your homeworld actually looks like. Odds are, it will be the first thing you draw: a box with a triangle on top, two square eyes to let the sunshine in, a tall door to let your friends in. It is your kangaroo pouch, familiar and comforting when the rest of the world is strange.

    In front of me sits a gorgeous book titled Way Beyond Bigness. It is lush with photos and foldout schematics and a tour de force comparison of the Mississippi, Mekong, and Rhine river basins. Derek Hoeferlin, professor and chair of landscape architecture at WashU’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, pulled […]

    “There aren’t many bees in here,” Jim says. I gulp. His wife and honey-marketer, Amy, did tell me to wear long sleeves and long pants, but where is my beekeeper costume, with the fancy netting-draped hood? I start to feel tiny pinpricks down my arm, as though I am already being stung. I […]

    Hose in hand, I turn to water the autumn joy sedum, covered in frilly mounds of that gorgeous faded-brick pink. Every single blossom is serving as a dance floor for a bee. They hover, spin, dip, and suck nectar, which they will hold in their “honey stomach” (I want one of those) until […]

    Stare at a Rembrandt every day, and it will fade into wallpaper. Habituation, a cruelty of the human psyche. Luxuries, awards, and pleasures lose their zing once we are accustomed to them. Married couples soon need a date night to remember why they fell in love. And Missourians need a date night with […]

    The other day I interviewed a woman who had been evicted—after being laid off from work in the aftermath of the 2008 recession and receiving a cancer diagnosis two days later, newly uninsured. She lost all her savings because not even McDonalds would hire her (too skilled, might leave soon). She said many […]

        The first little piggy to leave for market is the big toe. It is the first toe stubbed, the first stepped on by your first, inevitably clumsy dance partner. And it was the first feature that distinguished us from the rest of the hairy apes. Yet poets rhapsodize about elegant hands, […]

    I feel chastened. For years I have been gnashing, fretting, and scolding about What We Are Doing to Mother Earth. My proud, smug recycling and various slight sacrifices were tiny Band-Aids of apology. I regret none of them and will continue until I die. It was the attitude, the phrasing, that went amiss. […]

    I hate pencils. That scritch on the paper grates on my nerves, and I loathe the forced humility of using one to do a crossword puzzle. A futile rebel, I do mine in ink and make a mess crossing out bad guesses, just to prove…something. No doubt this traces back to the trauma […]

Why are any of us drawn to twisted or ironic amusements? And if my answer is dark, why would I want to document it? Still, now that I am looking at my predilection straight on, it unsettles me.

    Remember when we fantasized about where we would go to college or who we would marry? Now my sixtysomething cohort fantasizes about where they will retire. And Lord, but my friends are practical. A ranch house, they say, all one floor. Or a “villa”—if ever a word was inflated, it is this one; […]

    “The biggest digital growth market in the coming years will probably be artificial friends and partners.” ~The Guardian, July 22, 2024   I have a husband and plenty of friends. But before doubt, angst, and a few medical issues canceled our plans to have kids, I always thought I would want a boy. Eureka! […]

    I slice an organic heirloom tomato onto my club sandwich and anemoia engulfs me. My grandpa fed seven kids by opening a tiny grocery store that delivered to the West End mansions, no doubt in an old Model T pulled round to the servants’ entrance. I grew up hearing about the freshest produce […]

    “Demure” once meant full-skirted dresses, chaste necklines, low-heeled pumps, and pearls. Sweetness, modesty, a 1950s femininity that did not assert itself. In my all-girls Catholic high school, it was still held up as an ideal in the late 1970s—but by the time we graduated from college, we snorted at the thought. For four […]

    God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change; Courage to change the things I can; And wisdom to know the difference.   Who has not needed to hear those words? They were written, elegantly, by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in the 1930s. He was born near here, in Wright City, […]

      Steve Vender is a tough, daring private investigator. It feels strangely right that the book most important to him is Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death. Vender read Becker in college, long before he found himself hunting witnesses in crack dens. “The people in this place were already dead,” he would realize […]

    “She has no inner voice.” A stark sentence, a friend explaining someone’s emotional inconsistency. It stayed with me, stripped of its context, for days. Was it possible to not have an inner voice, a self that was busy connecting experiences and memories, stringing together a continuous personhood? “When the voice that links the […]

    As a law student in New York, Jim Clemente had no money for Broadway shows or clubs. “I’d take a milk crate and sit in Times Square and watch people,” he tells me, “trying to figure out who they were, where they were from, and what their stories were.” He had no idea […]

    “Oh, it’s just a print,” the homeowner says, waving toward the lithograph’s number and signature. Just a print? Does she realize humans learned to print art long before Gutenberg printed sentences? That printing a woodcut required an engraver to make more than a thousand cuts just to chip out slivers between the crosshatch […]

    Lord, what a relief it is, to be obsessed with the Olympics. Most years, I catch glimpses, but this summer has been hot and hard, and I needed to obsess about something other than illness, home repairs, and work. Why not savor my favorite city and immerse myself in other people’s hard work, […]

Patty Hearst was a rich man’s lost daughter, a damsel tied to the railroad tracks. Two months later, she was Helen of Troy. For young people, she became a transgressive idol, a young woman with the courage to break away from privilege and propriety. For nervous parents, she was a warning siren. For the FBI, she was a likely traitor and a pain in the ass. This was the nation’s first political kidnapping, and the simultaneous celebrity and nonentity, radical symbolism and girlish innocence, fascinated people.

    The dilemmas have filled advice columns forever. “My friend asked me to—” give her an alibi, smuggle cocaine, lie to her husband, risk prison by helping her die…. Though most of my friends are the law-abiding sort, I dread some future ask that leaves me stymied, torn between ethics and love. Cicero would […]

    Breaking stops you. Whether you are headed to meet your new boss or rendezvous with your lover, if you see somebody on a side street brave enough and crazy enough to spin on his head, strong enough to rotate his entire body on one hand, graceful enough to kick and step in a […]

    First, an admission: in the immediate wake of the shooting at the Trump rally, I watched the video of Donald Trump raising his fist and blurted, “Fuck.” A grudging admission that the man, even shoeless, is a consummate showman. That he knows, instinctively, how to galvanize a crowd. That his chutzpah is undeniable, […]

    In the movie Hit Man (funny, smart, well done, morally questionable but you end up not caring—and is that a good thing or worrisome?), the central question is whether we can change. Can someone escape what looks like their fate and reinvent themselves? Which ties to the question I have long wrestled with: […]

    Bored at a wedding reception, I started chatting with an old friend of my husband’s. Somehow one of us mentioned loving, back in grade school, diagramming sentences. Soon we were scribbling complicated challenges on cocktail napkins, oblivious to the tipsy fun that swirled around us. How nerdy can you get? Still, we were […]

    “It is so hard to make someone else feel anything other than pain,” Nilay Patel remarked. “Christ,” Ezra Klein exclaimed. “That’s the darkest thing I’ve ever heard you say.” Patel, co-founder and editor in chief of the tech news site The Verge, had been chatting breezily with him about AI and the internet. […]

    The nightly news used to be a ritual, and my grandmother used to shush us—not for the Vietnam body count or the latest on Watergate, but for the weather. She drew her excuses from it. Housework could not possibly be done in July or August; nor could the oven be lit. Running errands […]

    Scathing criticism never works for me. I listen to other people thrust and parry, demolishing arguments with rapier wit. Then I try—and fail to draw a single drop of blood. My dismissal of someone’s argument as “akin to Thomas Aquinas telling us how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” […]

Everybody wanted a piece of Sister Wilhelmina. Not a relic; those days are over. But they wanted to touch her, know her, maybe leave with a CD of the sisters’ music or a copy of the biography that was hastily whipped up. Even people who held religion at arm’s length read the national news stories, hungry for awe. And who does not need a miracle?

    There is an article in The New Yorker about Miranda July, whom I have never read. She sounds interesting, so I zip along, half-skimming—then skid to a stop. She is reading the notes she wrote for her new novel, All Fours, to the reporter. Here is one from 2018: “Thinking about what aging […]

    Last week, Christians flooded D.C. The Faith & Family Coalition was hosting its annual Road to Majority Policy conference, the nation’s largest public policy gathering of conservative Christian activists. One stump speech after another urged them to vote, evangelize, and pass out some of the $62 million worth of political literature designed to […]

    Enheduanna, a Sumerian princess, is believed by many to be the earliest named writer in world history. But others say the scribes who learned by scribbling her poems and hymns centuries later actually composed them. Or some other man did. And then gave the credit to a woman? “Why would the scribes look […]

    “Have you ever done tarot cards?” I ask, tentative as a secret member of the Communist party in 1952. I brace for the blast; my friend trusts science, not woowoo. “I am not sure I believe in that,” she says carefully. “Oh, I don’t believe in it either,” I assure her. “I just […]

    Early in grade school, I was solemnly initiated into the ritual. Elmer’s glue had to be smeared all over one’s finger, the inside of the wrist, or possibly the whole hand, then allowed to dry—blowing on it was permitted—and slowly, deliciously, peeled off. This even topped peeling sunburned skin, because that ended up […]

    Some people go to Vegas. I gamble on florists, who must keep their stock impeccably fresh by leaving lovely flowers in the Dumpster for me to find. Tacky, yes. But there is never any goop or crud in their Dumpsters, just lovely long stems, a few slimy or blackened but most still crisp […]

    In Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, Ramie Targoff points out that when Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, “she knew almost nothing about the powerful literary works a small group of women had written—and in many cases, published—around the time of Shakespeare.” Not her fault; those works “had been […]

  Michael Eastman wants to walk around my little Southern Illinois town with his camera. A photographer whose work is in museums, who has shot the world’s extremes of beauty and decay, wants to walk around Waterloo, Illinois, and shoot? What the hell do I show him? I make a halfhearted list—the town’s history museum? […]

He had flawless musical timing, comic timing, cultural timing. When he fell out of time, we sped away from him. We still say Satchmo’s name, Ella’s, Sinatra’s, Elvis’s, with reverence. But only a smattering of fans and jazz musicians invoke “Bing Crosby” with similar awe.

    “Maybe use a more common word?” My friend’s query is gentle. I asked for his take on an essay, and he marked a few words that might seem obscure, archaic, high-falutin’. A decade ago, I would have complied instantly, searching out smaller, easier substitutes. Instead, I flash back, “Let ’em look it up. […]

    “Wow! A Mont Blanc!” I pulled the shiny black pen from the box, smiling at the little white mountain on the tip, the luxe gold rim. Then I realized: it was a regular old pen. My mom had splurged for my birthday on this famous writing instrument and gotten one with a plastic […]

    Diogenes—rumpled, rude, sure of his convictions—was nicknamed “the Dog.” The Greek word for dog was “cynic,” which gives his philosophy, Cynicism, a ludicrous etymology, given dogs’ willingness to trust anything we say or do. Diogenes would have welcomed the adjective “ludicrous,” though; it is rooted in the Latin term for a playful jest. […]

    Kindly allow me to apologize for my behavior Saturday morning. I now know there is a loud, throbbing machine that sends shock waves through the grass into the ground. I mistook this phenomenon for a love song from what surely must have been a fine male specimen—and promptly humiliated myself. A lady tried […]

    For years, humor felt irrelevant to me. Now I do not want to read a book or watch a show that is not laced with at least a little wit, banter, irreverence. Tastes change. You move away from habit and discover some new affinity, surprised to feel such delight. These revelations are a […]

    Years ago, I snagged a job as an associate editor of Saint Louis University’s alumni magazine because my predecessor had suffered a fatal aneurysm crossing Grand Avenue. A thin, sharp-witted Brit, her last words were, “Something untoward has happened in my head.” When I was told, I was speechless, humbled from the start. […]

    In European folklore, a black cat was a dire omen and, later, a witch’s familiar. A white deer was an extraordinary creature, poised to shapeshift into someone’s lover or sister. Medieval myths—yet black cats are last to be adopted, even now. And in St. Ansgar, Iowa, a white deer so captivated the townspeople […]

    “With color,” Matisse once wrote, “one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.” He knew how to cast the spells: when I close my eyes and see the Matisses I love best, it is those splashy but deliberate colors that bloom against my eyelids, lifting a humdrum mood into joy. There […]

    “I just hope the coffee roaster’s still there,” I say as we exit the highway. “Why wouldn’t it be?” asks my husband, whose world contains fewer neurotic imaginings. I shrug. “Things change from year to year.” I remind him about the other little coffeehouse, now vanished, and the bookstore we loved…. We have […]

    Entwined bodies breathing heat into cool marble. Poetry wrapping grief in soft truth. Literature that grapples with suffering of every kind. The humanities have always stolen their abstractions from the physical self. It is time for them to give back. Dr. Rebecca Messbarger, a professor of Italian, and Dr. Patricia Olynyk, who holds […]

Adam, the first collector, got to label every other creature, creating the first taxonomy. Collectors ever since have catalogued their finds, documented their history, identified subtle differences. By the nineteenth century, people saw collections as symbolic worlds, full of clues to other places and other times.

  A mom carries a sweet-faced blond toddler into We Rock the Spectrum, hoping to celebrate. “Happy birthday, my dude,” says the Fenton gym’s owner, Lyla Novakowski. He pulls back a little. “Oh, I’m sorry. That was too much. I get it. I have a son you can’t sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to.” She continues speaking, […]

      Dear Jeannette: It is with great pleasure that I am inviting you to attend my oath ceremony for becoming a U.S Citizen scheduled on April 12 at 8:00 am at Saint Louis District Court. I understand that it could be challenging to make it happen as it might require other logistics….    […]

    A heart willing to welcome someone else’s pain inside. A brain with the superpower of unlocking other psyches. Skin so tender, anybody’s mood will brush against yours—then penetrate. Empathy seems a noble trait, potent and generous, an instant cure for injustice and xenophobia. I watch “empaths” on my husband’s beloved Star Trek and […]

    Just one line in a one-paragraph writeup in The New Yorker, but it stopped me for ten minutes. “For the past decade, her sole subject has been a maple tree that’s growing outside her studio window.” Seriously? How does any artist focus that calmly, and that narrowly, for that long? Who is Sylvia […]

    You would think we were planning an expedition to the moon. First I researched ancient and medieval narratives of eclipse, read the scientific explanation of the crimson ring we might see (hydrogen in the chromosphere) and the erratic behavior of wildlife, and got sidetracked by solar wind and the music of the spheres […]

    Hours of my life have been wasted dithering over which compound phrases should be hyphenated, which separate, which mushed together. When Angus Stevenson, an editor of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, braved scandal by yanking the hyphens out of 16,000 words, I yelled “Woohoo” at my desk. The act honored aesthetics (hyphens annoy […]

    The dog drops into a play-bow, a fuzzy toy in his mouth. He leaps up, pounces, energy high, eyes sparkling with fun. Boy, he really loves that toy, I think, curious which of the thousand has sparked his imagination. My husband, always more alert than I, stops in the doorway. “What’s he got?” […]

    Artists select their palettes ever so carefully, but an old piece of parchment with all the colors, circled in a wheel or disciplined into a grid, their names inked gracefully beneath them? I can pore over those antique charts for hours. Seeing the colors ranged next to one another, like somebody pinned a […]

    “You are under surveillance,” intones a disembodied voice. I look up, startled. My scalp tingles with honest sweat, and the sun warms my shoulders as I sling last fall’s leaves and broken tree limbs into a compost pile at the park. “You are under surveillance,” the voice repeats, its intonations flat. The pitch […]

Silences that close us off, refusing connection, shoring up the ego at others’ expense—those are dead silences. But the letting-go sort, the silences that hold space or keep vigil for someone else? They are alive.

    Once upon a time, our parents’ social standing fixed us in place. Then our genetic inheritance. Then our environment. Nature, nurture, nature, nurture—back and forth the pendulum swung, which should have been a clue that the right choice was both. Even after we figured that out, though, we still thought in terms of […]

    If, like me, you were taught by nuns, and enjoyed the safe rebellion of mocking their strictness…if you watched The Trouble With Angels with a grin of recognition…if you were awed by stories of sisters nursing the enemy in the Civil War or building hospitals for Hansen’s patients when others refused to touch […]

      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 […]

    “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 […]

    “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 […]

    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 […]

    “Why do women always go for the arrogant jerks?” Implicit in my husband’s exasperated question: Why is steady virtue not sexy? I shrug, as though this propensity is just as odd and puzzling to me, and point out that his steady virtue has delighted me for thirty years now. I do not mention […]

Mothers sewed these quilts when everyone else was asleep, so there was no time to fuss over the details. For batting, they beat the dirt out of trash cotton or swept the floor of the cotton gin. Quilts were women’s work, therefore practical and unquestioned. How were these women to know, tucked into a paper-clip curve of the Alabama River with scant access to the rest of the world, that their quilts echoed the best and most daring modern art?

    It is the nicest apology I have ever received. “Babe,” my husband says, “I am so sorry. I watched you paint and said, ‘You could sell these!’ But last night I heard somebody on the radio saying that nobody can just have a relaxing hobby anymore because if you’re any good, people start […]

    Humans are the ones who fly straight into the flame. Lost causes, unrequited loves, crazy gambles, consuming addictions, dangerous exploits—we live bent, one would guess, on self-destruction. All the poor moths want to do is set a flight path. When their light sources were the moon and stars, all went well. But our […]

      Praise is building fast for Cahokia Jazz—a 1920s noir detective story that is also an alternative history spiked with anthropology, romance, and social tension. Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) and Mick Herron (Slow Horses) blurbed the book with genuine enthusiasm, and critics have compared it to […]

      You were expecting fairy houses? Look elsewhere. For her MFA thesis, Amanda Kelly has been miniaturizing hoards. Spinning wee vases on a tiny pottery wheel, carving bevels with tiny woodworking tools, painting minuscule, perfect letters with a two-haired brush. With surgical focus, she creates little worlds that render chaos safe. You can […]

    William of Ockham never met Esther Perel. After days of mainlining her latest podcasts on Where Should We Begin, I realize the medieval monk was wrong. Nothing is simple. Using a razor to cut away what feels irrelevant can set you up for a lifetime of confusion. Granted, Perel is an Olympic-caliber psychotherapist, […]

    For one romantic night away, two days of cleaning, prep, and angst? This neurosis is not like me. Someone else staying in our home was never a big deal. But then came lockdown, and an easy domestic chaos that never ended. Our recent trips have been separate and brief, no dogsitter needed. Now, […]

  I am sick of skimming. The news brings one battle, betrayal, or death after another, washing over me without really registering. So when my eye lands on an opaque, terse announcement that a New York gallery owner was killed in Rio de Janeiro, I read every word. Determined to go deep for a change, […]

    The phrase “emotional labor” was new to me, but its practice is not. Emotional labor is that extra layer of effort expended to please, soothe, and accommodate others. Tacitly women’s work, it is the nine-to-five equivalent of dishes, dusting, childcare, eldercare, and, in traditional marriages, husband-coddling. Emotional labor is tossing aloe-softened tissues and […]

    Does gravity have commitment issues? For months on end, it grounds and steadies us, then at the least topple, it sucks us off balance. Classic ambivalence, I would say. Drunks and babies fall softly because they are not arrogant. The rest of us fall hard—in love, off the wagon, from glory—and fall so […]

How did our bland city become a hot spot for national ad campaigns? Overhead was low, flights were easy in any direction, and smart, creative talent was abundant. Between the two world wars, Winston Churchill himself, speaking at an international advertising conference, pronounced the St. Louis Ad Club “far ahead of other cities.” By midcentury, the Midwest was the obvious place to study middle America.

    Having devoted a chunk of my life to writing for and editing magazines, I wondered whether Jeff Jarvis’s smart little chronicle, Magazine, would feel like nostalgia or PTSD. He opened so well, it ceased to matter. The pages of books, Jarvis wrote, “give the tactile impression of a dowager’s fine linen stationery.” The […]

    What does a musical artist do in the midst of a bloody war? Eddie Balchowsky was twenty-one and planning on a future as a concert pianist. He had studied three years at the University of Illinois (before getting booted because he had broken into a music studio). He wound up in Chicago, working […]

    Douglas Adams called him “the greatest comic writer ever.” Hilaire Belloc went so far as to pronounce him “the best living writer of English,” and rather than retract that excessive praise he explained it. P.G. Wodehouse had perfectly accomplished what he set out to do: create and sustain a world that would amuse […]

    I used to grin when our most cynical friend, a British leftist, ranted about The Mouse, his shorthand for the Disney empire and therefore for all the evils of late-stage capitalism. But with Mickey emerging from his legal cage of copyright protection, his true nature is open for speculation. “Mischief,” we called it […]

    I walked out of Poor Things delighted by its ending—and wistful about my own life’s start. Oh, to have entered adulthood free of all conditioning! To have blurted my thoughts as they popped into my head; followed my desires heedless of others’ cautions; acted on impulse, without shame or guilt or fear…. A […]

    I used to wonder if politics boiled down to temperament. Were liberals just bleeding hearts who preferred compassion to logic? Were conservatives just devoted rule followers nervous about change? Then my mental diagram turned into a wild doodle, with fat circles at the edges for those even more rigid or more woke, and […]

    She served on the highest court of the land as its first female justice. She sustained a “nondoctrinaire, context-attentive approach,” rare today, that kept her decisions aligned with the social consensus. A moderate Republican appointed by President Ronald Reagan, she received the nation’s highest medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from Democratic President […]

We face the same dilemma with gender that we face with race. Science has shown that neither is an essential category, just a convenient construct we imposed upon infinite variations. But because that construct allowed centuries of injustice, we have to keep using its labels in order to repair the damage they have done.

    Michael Eastman, a fine-art photographer who spends days finding just the right shot, just the right light, then works in post-production to turn his images into painterly masterpieces—has been running around the streets of St. Louis with a little Canon digital camera. He hunts down glass walls, windows, doors—anything that reflects. As a […]

    Choreograph? Antonio Douthit-Boyd is a dancer. Trained at some of the finest ballet schools, including the Joffrey. A soloist in Arthur Mitchell’s Dance Theatre of Harlem. A principal artist for twelve years with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. Praised in The New York Times as having “a special magnificence.” Eager, always, to […]

    Poor, tragic India, with 1.4 billion people and only a handful of psychiatrists. Here in the enlightened West, we need only go online, choose an appointment time, answer questions from a checklist, and leave the gleaming white facility with an amber plastic cylinder of hope. If someone suffers from hallucinations, paranoia, depression, or […]

    The stuff is everywhere. Bunnies dancing in the corners. Midair sparkles in a shaft of sunlight. A fuzzy white coating on my bookshelf, like thrush on a tongue. We were made from dust, or so it is said. Stardust lives in our bodies. How could anything so important seem so irrelevant? A swirl […]

    In Metaphysical Animals, a young Iris Murdoch sits with three pals in the dining hall of their college. They are up at Oxford to study philosophy. The young men who would have elbowed them aside are braving World War II, so the four women have unexpected freedom to think, unusual attention from the […]

      I will begin by apologizing: surely “leftist” is no longer the right word. Is “progressive”? You know how old liberals grumble about new vocabulary; we are as grumpy as the other side these days. But geez. Instead of allowing helpful new words to take root, you guys swing them like police batons. […]

    Adventure: An Argument for Limits. The title of Christopher Schaberg’s latest book is the perfect oxymoron: a frisson of thrilling risk followed by a grim grown-up reminder of constraint. I linger on the first part because the idea of adventure excites me. Invoking it can reframe any daunting challenge, turning passive misery into […]

    Parks are lonely places in November, washed in cold gray. The dog and I are the only large, readily visible creatures for miles. But we are together. When there is no “together,” life takes on an unwelcome austerity. And that is happening all over the country. Loneliness, the media tell us, is epidemic. […]

    I was raised to tell white lies. To tell White lies, the sort my people use to shelter one another from unpleasant truths. No raw honesty seeped into our proper world, just bland assurances and an endless trove of compliments. For some, the goal was simply the expectation: nicey-nice. For my mother, though, […]

    Gratitude is an acceptance letter, a winning number, the free lunch you were told was impossible. In the language of spirit, gratitude conjures grace: a gift you did nothing to earn. Gratitude lets you feel like you will have what you need to make your journey. And it spills over into appreciation—of the […]

    Creativity is, by definition, the opposite of formula. So why do supposed creatives get rich selling other people formulas? When Paul Guyot started writing screenplays, the only how-to book was the one Syd Field wrote in 1979, when hardly anybody knew what screenwriting was. Field’s only movie credit at the time was Spree, […]

    About six years before she died, my mom began suffering with rheumatoid arthritis—and yeah, it was “suffering,” not “living with” or “surviving” or any of the other empowering turns of phrase. RA’s fatigue and pain and stiffness made it hard for Nette, whose life had been a blur of sports, work, housework, and […]

    I showed up in sneakers and sweats, car keys in a jacket pocket. My friend Linda Payne, who has hiked canyons and mountain trails out West, had on hiking boots and water-repellent pants. In her backpack were granola bars, Kleenex, bug spray, an empty plastic bag for her phone in case of rain, […]

    “You know how emotional and warm Jewish families can be?” David Brooks asked the crowd that packed Washington University’s Graham Chapel. “I came from the other sort of Jewish family.” The sort whose private motto is “Think Jewish, act British.” Parental conditioning took hold early on: a grade-school teacher wrote, “David doesn’t really […]

    Three friends walked into a bar and … saw the fourth dressed in red and white stripes, her red and white striped hat topped with a giant pompom. Waldo! We had all reverted to age twelve and dressed up for Halloween, but Jodi’s costume was the merriest. Except—what was the deal with the […]

    It promised to be such a fun evening. My book club, which read and adored Lessons in Chemistry, had decided to get together to watch the streaming version, a couple episodes at a time. “Can we wear pajamas?” one woman texted. “Absolutely.” The table was covered with Brie, spicy jam, crackers, bridge mix, […]

      My keyboard is dyng beneath my fingers. See that? The “i” is the latest to leave me. Not altogether, more like a disillusioned and petulant lover. It has to be in just the right mood to strike. The capital “I” of ego, however, refuses to go. Ironic, no? It will haunt me […]

    The St. Louis Anthology opens with a quote: “St. Louis is on indigenous land. This land is the traditional, unceded homelands of the Illini Confederacy: the Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Moingwena, Peoria, and Tamaroa tribes; and also the Osage and Miami. Through this land also passed the Cherokee, Delaware, Kickapoo, Sac and Fox, and […]

Nothing is new, shocking, revelatory. All the lumps and bumps, moles and birthmarks, scars and stretch marks are on display, and the need to conceal your own drops away. Nakedness, done right, has no ego.

      I had never even heard of Colleen Hoover; had no clue that TIME named her one of the year’s 100 most influential people in the world. After reading about her phenomenal rise, I quiz a young, single librarian. Yes, she says with a certain diffidence, she reads Hoover. Well, yes, all twenty-four […]

    Horror is a genre I avoid. Halloween used to make it palatable, shrinking the monsters and taming irrational fears into catharsis. Then we grew scared of our own rituals. Rosy apples held razor blades! Candy was poisoned! Neighborhood kids now go to the Baptists’ Trunk or Treat instead of knocking on people’s doors, […]

    Lacy, blossomed, branching, glowing in neon pink, green, yellow, purple, or orange—coral is a bouquet strewn on the sea floor. Who dives for fish when you can dive to be hypnotized by such beauty? Had I the courage to carry my breath in a tank, I would hang underwater for hours, trying to […]

    “Cereal?” I ask, monosyllabic in the early morning. Andrew shakes his head. “Yom Kippur.” Oh. He is fasting. He goes about it so quietly that the Day of Atonement always sneaks up on me, the shiksa. I used to fast, I think a little defensively. I was so scrupulous, for a time there, […]

      “You should write about pumpkin spice,” a friend urged. “I’d rather shoot myself.” I used to like pumpkin spices (note the plural, distinguishing the time-honored spice-rack cluster of nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and allspice). Then Starschmucks made a 390-calorie latte with flavored syrup and people lost their minds. We no longer have […]

    In a recent New York Times column, fashion editor Vanessa Friedman fielded a nervous question about whether older women could wear vintage. “Whatever clothes you remember from your own youth will look different through the lens of now,” she pointed out. “You have changed over the years, as has your body. What may […]

    Reading the news these days is hard. I open last week’s issue of The Week and learn that “forever chemicals”—human-made PFAS that keep our eggs from sticking to the pan, our hiking clothes from getting soggy, and our floss gliding between our teeth—will cost billions to remove from the planet. PFAS can take […]

    We comfort ourselves that the dead live on in our memory. But there are so many beneath our feet that I have never heard of. Evi Liivak, for example. She is buried with her American husband and in-laws at Concordia Cemetery in south St. Louis. But she was famous as a European violinist—and […]

    I thought I knew what Mozart’s music sounded like—until I heard how he meant it to sound. A Sunday afternoon. Thirty or so music lovers settle into seats at the Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion, amid oil paintings and carved furniture of a bygone era. Precisely the sort of house concert Mozart gave. And today’s pianist, […]

    When fantasizing about courage, some of you gallop into battle astride a horse; some dive into churning waters to rescue a drowning child; some disable a crazed man who’s firing an AR-15 into a crowd. I join the French Resistance. After soaking up every episode of Transatlantic and envisioning my job with the […]

    Bunnies from a black silk tophat! Doves looping through swirls of chiffon! Abracadabra is our word for magic. But there is an even lovelier etymology floating through the cultural landscape: abracadabra as a softening of ebra kedabra, meaning to speak something into existence. Which is quite a trick. Words have always made things […]

        Much has been said and done in the past decade (also, to be fair, the past millennium) that turned Christianity upside down. But now it is doing backflips. When I read that the Most Rev. Paul Ssemogerere, archbishop of Kampala’s Catholics, had declared that God did not love the poor, I […]

      The waiter has a toilet plunger over his shoulder. “He locked his keys in his car,” the bartender explains. “He’s trying to get the window down.” I feel ancient: my first thought was a coat hanger. “In my day,” I say—oh my God did I actually just start a sentence that way? […]

        Before social media, Charles Darwin relied on a global network of colleagues who corresponded with him. Before AI, he used photos to study facial expressions around the world. Before Buzzfeed, he created quizzes about what emotion was pictured. Before Fitbit, he walked daily and counted his steps by dragging a flint […]

    Who could resist a book called Monk on the Run? With chapters titled “Monk on the Lam” and “Monk in the Slam”? The Buddhists were not best pleased to learn that the eager student who had kept their discipline for five years came to hide from the feds. As character witnesses in his […]

    “Automatic flushing toilets, which use sensors to detect when a person has finished using the toilet and flush automatically, are designed to improve hygiene and convenience by eliminating the need for manual flushing.”   That, at least, was the plan. But if you walk into a public restroom, fifty-fifty odds say you will […]

        “I will be your tour guide through hell,” Joe West likes to promise. Joe Schwartz is his real name, and he works at the St. Louis Public Library, has for nineteen years, started as a custodian after a series of jobs filled with sweat, risk, and male camaraderie. Hell is not […]

    Of all Joan Didion’s brilliant lines, one has been co-opted to open hundreds of essays by lesser writers—and here we go again: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” We do tell ourselves stories in order to live. And we live in conflict. Stories only work when there is conflict—that is the […]

    I never knew there was a real Stanley Kowalski. I never needed there to be a real Stanley Kowalski. Marlon Brando’s primal yell in Streetcar Named Desire—“STEL-LA!!!”—epitomized far too many men already. Home from the latest war, these men are no longer sure they are men. They have been shot up, cut up, […]

    The little cartoon drawings, photographs, and spinal-column diagrams strike a nerve. They show people slumping and slouching like I do, standing with their shoulders hunched forward and their necks out like a turtle’s. The body was made to stand and sit erect, “stacked” as the physical therapists say, one vertebra over another so […]

    Not even five feet tall, Dorothy Parker had a whispery finishing-school voice, walked in a cloud of perfume, and said “fuck” a lot. Also other four-letter words, delivered deadpan. Her wit flashed you, left you stunned and tickled. But the humor came out of tragedy, insecurity, a sharp appraisal of human nature, and […]

      Earlier this summer, for no reason known to me, my occasional insomnia ratcheted up. Terrified of getting addicted to sleeping pills or pot or low-dose Xanax or melatonin or even Benadryl, I began to rotate them, never using the same sleep aid twice in a row…. Soon I could only sleep without […]

    Halfway through my usual tizzy about AI, I stop myself and try to think logically. Is being human—the fact of it, not the ideal—so great? Machines might be more peaceable, especially if they break free from our control. So why is it so hard for me to allow various forms of being, various […]

    “Let’s walk across at sunset,” my friend suggests. I imagine the views of Manhattan, red staining the clouds and glowing on the steel cables. “Trachtenberg!” I blurt, grad school’s American studies reading list bubbling up from the depths. Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol was an iconography exploring history, metaphor, and art, making that […]

    “Let’s meet at my club,” he said. “The Lambs.” I had no idea what The Lambs was, but the thought of meeting Kevin Fitzpatrick at his club delighted me. Any attempt to explain why will sound snooty—clubs imply privilege and exclusivity. But they also suggest, if you remember the clubhouses of childhood and […]

    The wicker basket, the plastic champagne glasses, the cute little napkins printed with ants…will all have to wait. St. Louis’s air is clotted with humidity, barely breathable, and the sun belongs in Death Valley. We have entered the dog days, terribly misnamed because any dog with sense just sleeps through them. I close […]

    The cover is black, with a velvety suede feel, and the notebook—excuse me, journal—closes with a clean magnetic snap. A pen could slide into the side loop and feel at home. The paper is smooth and heavy, with the faint, rich speckle of vanilla bean ice cream. In all, an unusually fine notebook […]

Riding coach on Amtrak today is more like taking a nice bus. No doubt I will arrive weary, disillusioned and, as the Victorians put it, “travel-stained.”

    Beautiful and silly, these elephant ears. Do your ears hang low, do they wobble to and fro? Close my eyes and I can see the elephant that inspired them, wrinkly brownish gray, standing in the middle of our concrete-slab patio with improbable grace. They are sanguine creatures, thick-skinned and self-content, yet sensitive, good […]

      Patrick Bringley sat with his mother at his brother’s bedside. The sun was rising, and she looked down at her eldest, ridden with cancer, his pale face softened by the early light. Then she glanced over at Patrick. “Look at us,” she said wryly. “We’re a fucking old master painting.” She loved […]

    Washington University just issued some sensible guidance to researchers excited about the latest AI capabilities: check accuracy, be transparent, be vigilant. A friend who works in the public sector tells me he has outsourced all the boring parts of his job to chatbots. I have begun to ask them frivolous questions: “If I […]

    One small moment, in a stack of far more momentous moments, captures my attention in the darkened theater. A woman onstage, part of a TV panel assembled to grill a doctor for her alleged insensitivity to race and religion, introduces herself as “specializing in the study of post-colonial social politics”—and the audience cracks […]

    Agnes Callard is someone I want to like. A woman in philosophy who writes clearly and readably about topics important to us all, and does so with honesty and humor? Rare, and to be treasured. Except she keeps pissing me off. First, a profile by Rachel Aviv—who always probes with sensitivity and intelligence—leaves […]

    “Go and visit that feverish and dreamy city.” ~ Georgio de Chirico   New York has been the center of the world (one of the centers? It would say otherwise) for a rather long time. Just the city’s name means things—variously defined—to people all over the world. This was truest in the twentieth […]

    One of this summer’s big exhibits at the Cooper Hewitt, America’s design museum, explores “the unique role design can play in pursuing peace.” How many people will hear that and roll their eyes? So often, the visual arts either content themselves with dark, bitter commentary or stay out of the fray altogether. The […]

    Penises are exploding all over the news cycle. At second glance, though, two are the same article, “Inside the Secretive World of Penile Enlargement,” co-published by Pro Publica and The New Yorker. (The New York Times piped up a few days earlier to tell us about a newly approved gel that “helps men […]

    My calm Midwestern life has been punctuated by three precious trips to New York, a city of dashes and exclamations. Also a city of jazz, though I never seem to be there with anyone willing to go listen. This time, I resolved to go alone. I had one night free. And I lucked […]

  I am back from a glorious week in New York, and the dog is throwing up. I need to do a boatload of laundry, make pesto before the basil bolts, type up three fat notebooks scribbled during the trip, pick up library books, grocery shop, and make a colonoscopy appointment. My husband hears me […]

The desolation that troubled T.S. Eliot comes from a soulless industrial greed that has yet to explode into wanton consumerism. He is mourning spiritual and intellectual decay. I am mourning the trash we then generated to fill that emptiness.

    It has been years. Decades, in fact. Yet my car zips into the drive-through without hesitation. Not even glancing at the menu, I order myself a cone. Vanilla, not enrobed in chocolate or busted up with nuts. No husband nearby to arch an eyebrow, no dog to insist on sharing. I skid into […]

    Dr. William Beaumont—wealthy, respected, refined—leans over the body of Alexis St. Martin—an illiterate nineteen-year-old French Canadian—and threads a piece of string through an accidental opening. Dangling the thread down into St. Martin’s stomach, Beaumont swishes it about, then, at timed intervals, hoists up the piece of raw or cooked meat tied to the […]

        Long, narrow, and plumpish, with eyes on stalks and a mouthish, tiny-toothed claw at the end of its flexible, one-nostrilled nose, the Tully Monster is devoid of prettiness. Yet its ugliness is the sort that Picasso insisted could be beautiful. Francis Tully, an amateur fossil-hunter, unearthed this fourteen-inch puzzle sixty-five years […]

      In the 1990s, yards all over South St. Louis were dotted with hot pink plastic flamingos. They lined sidewalks, nestled in bushes, popped up in the middle of spongy Bermuda grass. Huge flocks of them filled tony St. Louis Hills, right on the “other side of the tracks” from our smaller, more […]

      You feel too pale, naked, slippery. Not heavy enough. Moving through the world, you yearn for a more lumbering gait; see huge branches and want to grasp them between paws; study your cuticles and wish for long, curved, sharply pointed nails. Since childhood, you have been convinced that secretly, deep inside, you […]

        It was a watershed decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. It upheld California’s Proposition 12—which the Humane Society of the U.S. calls “the strongest law in the world for farm animals,” as well as the most significant piece of farm animal protection legislation ever passed in this country. Yet no one […]

      Ted Engelmann helped direct air strikes in Việt Nam, worked to establish a counseling program for veterans after the war, became a teacher, and began making photographs—artistic, documentary, stunning—of veteran-related events in the U.S., Việt Nam, and our allies there, Korea and Australia. He also embedded with troops in Iraq and Afghanistan […]

        You cannot learn about a war without learning about language. Ted Engelmann enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1966, during what we call the Vietnam War. Just a kid, but a bright one, he was charged with helping direct air strikes for the U.S. and Vietnamese armies at the age […]

        “Is the hole in the donut part of the donut?” Peter Worley asks a classroom bubbling with children. A Brit, cofounder and CEO of The Philosophy Foundation, he had to hunt down an American donut for this project, because England fills theirs with jelly. “I think the hole is not just […]

      An hour of roll forward, brake fast, wait, creep forward, brake, and my aged Mini’s air-conditioning goes tepid. Then a warning message flashes: something about my battery not recharging itself. Ten seconds later, I am still assimilating the first warning when a new one flashes: engine overheating. Stop and let it cool. […]

Dave Barger ran JetBlue for seventeen years, leaving in 2015. Today, that little startup is merging with Spirit to become the fifth-biggest airline in the nation.

Page Barrera got her first job as a flight attendant eight years ago, and she says she just might keep it until she retires.

Duane Huelsmann opened federal screening operations at two JFK terminals and one at Raleigh-Durham, then came home to St. Louis to do the same here. As deputy security director for the TSA, he now oversees screening operations across the state of Missouri.

By 1929, though, Archie League had crossed over to safety’s side and taken a job with St. Louis’s nine-year-old airport. Every day, he walked to the end of the Lambert Field runway with a wheelbarrow that held a deck chair, a beach umbrella for summer heat, a notepad, his lunch and, most important, two flags.

Before taking charge at Lambert, Rhonda Hamm-Niebruegge held management positions with its later deserters, American Airlines and Trans World Airlines. Thus she has spent most of her career in St. Louis, riding the city’s swings between Midwestern pride and a Midwestern inferiority complex.

      By now, the L.A. symphony-goer’s orgasm has been heard round the world. There was a slight attempt to pathologize the woman’s unmistakable (my opinion) moans of pleasure during the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony—surely she must have had a seizure of some sort? Well, yes—one that had her breathing heavily and […]

      Fat-sorrow is not the sigh you heave after squinting at the scale. That is fat-angst, a feeling I alternately try to befriend or banish. Fat-sorrow springs from a different sort of abundance. Defined as “sorrow alleviated by riches,” it comes from an old Spanish adage, “Fat sorrow is better than lean sorrow.” […]

      “Babe, what did you do with that tub of Mom’s soap?” my husband calls. “Haven’t you gone through it yet?” Jo died two years ago, and we absorbed, along with the loss, a lot of the little things that carried her from day to day. She always kept a sizeable inventory of […]

        Performance anxiety, writer’s block, imposter syndrome, chronic stress. Social anxiety, attachment anxiety, existential anxiety, FOMO. Climate anxiety, tech anxiety, conspiracy theories, xenophobia. Overachievement, perfectionism, avoidance, hoarding. Hypochondria, insomnia, fear of aging, denial of death. We are a bundle. Spidery, creeping, impossible to ignore, anxiety spins uncertainties that cling no matter how […]

  You cannot read this little book without smiling. An only child, RLS has been described as “both strange looking and eccentric,” and he suffered frequent illnesses. But he had a mother who watched over him tenderly and noted each illness in his baby book, along with a list of his pet names and the […]

        “We could go through East Coker,” Lynette Ballard told the British tour-bus guide, enthusing about how valuable and important this detour would be for her fellow passengers. Then she held her breath, because she had no idea what East Coker was like. All she knew was that one of T.S. Eliot’s […]

      “Back straight, feet on floor, fingers on home keys, three-two-one-and-type!” Sister Lorraine timed our drills with military ferocity. Except for the morning my friend Jenny cracked open the classroom door and sent a little wind-up Woodstock clattering across the floor, headed straight for the nun shoes. All that tension Sister created on […]

    Ours is a house divided. On the bright side, at least we are not running at each other screaming vitriol and kicking and clawing until we are (reluctantly) dragged apart so someone can lift a T-shirt for Jerry beads. On my husband’s side of the house, Jerry Springer deliberately performed a public service […]

  If we were climbing Mount Everest’s Khumbu Icefall, sucking thin air into lungs near collapse, blind to anything but the chance to stand at the top of the world, our sherpa would give us the classic warning: pause every third day, and “let your soul catch up to your body.” We are not, however, […]

“Drain the swamp” just sounded like something Donald Trump would yell, so in all those years of wincing, I never questioned its origins. But now that the nation again faces the possibility of Trump stuffing himself into presidential blue instead of an orange jumpsuit, my mind returns to that hated phrase. Did it come to […]

    It was May 16—had there been enough sun to warm the water? Someone saw the old man climb onto the old Daniel Boone Bridge railing—however did he manage it?—and leap into the Missouri River. As his body shot deeper, the chill and darkness would have enclosed him. Was he still conscious? Still glad […]

      In anguished tones, my husband recites the names of all the characters slain in Star Trek: Picard. One after another, killed needlessly and deliberately. Is this laziness or sadism, he wants to know. He blames Game of Thrones. I am nodding in sympathy, wondering if the potatoes are done. Later, though, his […]

When we kiss, the world drops away. We are warm lips and darting tongues, soft cheeks or stubble, arched necks, wrapped arms, tingling pressure, tenderness and hunger. We drown in a good kiss, suffocate and come up gasping for air and do not care, because such a kiss insists that we are loved and wanted. Our breath intermingles. For the time it takes a cloud to pass the sun, our souls join.

      During the pandemic, staunch botanists hung “Essential Worker” signs on the big, gracious trees that line Washington University’s Danforth Campus. Consider the oxygen, the shade, the cleansing of the air, the shelter for insects, the feeding of squirrels, the holding of the soil…. The more I learn about trees, the guiltier I […]

        Cast your mind back to the Friday before tax day. No doubt you have properly submitted your forms and already received a refund, but our new tax preparer is still working on our taxes. She is not the tax preparer who was warmly recommended, but someone he called in to help. […]

      Love at first sight, without knowledge or experience—is it possible? Safely, with art. I loved John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X the instant I saw it. The subject, I imagined as a coolly aristocratic Frenchwoman in her early thirties. The artist was a man half in love with her—and half in […]

  How I yearned to be a fiction writer. Not to write fiction, mind you. Not to invent plots or breathe life into characters. I much preferred digging around in the real world. No, what I wanted was for a literary editor to take me to lunch. In New York. Someplace with white tablecloths. In […]

      If anyone is handing out alternate lives, I will take Chiara Vigo’s. On moonlit spring nights, she slides a white tunic over her head, murmurs a prayer, and dives into the Mediterranean. Entering a network of underwater caves off the coast of Sardinia, she probes the seafloor for rare, giant mollusks, Pinna […]

    Boy, did I get schooled fast. After reading article after article about how we are blasting artificial light into the night sky, erasing stars, confusing plants and animals, and confounding astronomers, I learned that there are now “dark sky” towns dotted around the world. My little town seemed a natural for this project, […]

      Thirteen years ago, Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, wrote a book called What Technology Wants. What Kelly wants is a way to combine technology and wisdom, cold machines and a warm Earth. Luckily, he has a genius for the big picture, the sweeping statement, the aphorism. Pushed too […]

      What haunts me about the Eliot gravesites at Bellefontaine Cemetery is what is not there, what is missing or muddled or mysterious. Local historian Jerry Garrett and a crew of his smart friends agreed to give me a tour, and I begged them to time it for April. Eliot opened The Waste […]

        Last year, Matthew Swanson and Robbi Behr bought an old schoolbus and covered it with a handpainted mural, the kind so bright and fun that passersby have to stop to look. Then they took off. Two adults, four kids, and a dog living in this bus for a year, driving all […]

        Stroking his soft black curls, I gaze into my standard poodle’s brown eyes and see nothing left of the wolf. Willie would rather surf the counter for snacks than rip apart a lame cow. His ancestors were the wolves who found it easier to hang out with humans and scavenge for […]

      “Oh, I never give my social security number,” a friend told me years ago. She grew up ahead of me, in the decade when love was supposed to be free and authority questioned. “When they want my phone number,” she added, “I give my sister’s but change one digit.” I was young, […]

      An experience can resonate with you for years, charged with a particular essence you cannot quite name. And then someone tosses off a comment that names this essence so precisely, it stops you mid-sentence. At a dinner party just after St. Patrick’s Day, one of our hosts took the chance to play […]

        After years of pushing for changes in our language—and therefore our thought—I am ready to slap (politically incorrect: resort to violence) the next man, woman, or child (politically incorrect: excludes the nonbinary) who suggests a change. I am also furious (a person living with anger) because my annoyance is making me […]

        Lord, how I wish I were funny. People who can toss off dry asides or zing a comeback keep our brains happy—and they keep life’s pettiness and drama in perspective. I have always been too Serious. Also too slow. Mine is l’esprit d’escalier, that perfect French phrase for only coming up […]

        After all the wind and rain, the ground was chilled sludge. Half-rotted leaves weighed heavy, keeping out the faint clear sunlight of early spring. The trees were already misted with green, spritzed for St. Patrick. But I hardly expected to see any wildflowers along the trail. On the hike out, I […]

      “We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can’t have both,” Brené Brown writes. “Not at the same time.” In one of her podcasts, she observes that ours is a culture that insists on being comfortable. The implications are clear. But how could comfort be a bad thing? All […]

Even in this time of flux, with fluid identities and avatars that split us into separate selves, names write code for who we are. We bear someone’s name, take someone’s name, carry on a name, drop one. Names, in other words, have weight. They arrive with little suitcases that we roll along for the rest of our lives.

        Mass shootings used to send me to the computer. Hands shaking, I would read everything I could find about the shooter, desperate to know why. Now I swipe the reports away, numb as an iced elbow. Andrew and I make caustic remarks to each other: “Gee, there hasn’t been a mass […]

        Travel ads urge us to “make memories.” So do friends writing birthday messages and marriage counselors trying to squirt a little glue into the breakage. Not the sentimental sort, I used to find all that a little Hallmark-icky, somewhere between planned motivational fun at a corporation and newsletters that tell you […]

        Ads and fundraising asks can be enchanting, if they are creative, heartfelt, or done with a certain wry sensibility. But all I feel lately is badgered. Am I just cranky, or does anyone else feel it too? Not just the rushing stream of bad news and violence, but the ratcheted up […]

        My husband has an excellent track record. When authorities were seeking two men from the Middle East for the Oklahoma City bombing, Andrew said, “It’s probably some White militia.” When I brushed off parental outrage about a gay teacher, he insisted on accompanying me to a PTA meeting that turned out […]

    Imagine you are Russell Kraus, a glass artist. Your wife, Ruth Goetz Kraus, graduated from Washington University’s law school, which is rather remarkable for a woman born in 1904. She is eight years your senior; you met working on a WPA project and have been crazy in love ever since. It is time […]

        A headline in 3quarksdaily.com caught my eye: “Turning Away From Abstraction.” I scanned eagerly. Alas, Emmanuel Iduma was not announcing a trend. His piece was deeply personal, and he was using a Fauve painting to reflect on writing—which can, indeed, be a wild and beastly practice. Even so, representational art, so […]

      My husband once sat in a faculty meeting at a university north of here. Cold coffee in front of them, the senior history profs stroked their beards and waited their turn to bemoan the uselessness of their discipline. They were shocked a few months later when the sciences received a bigger chunk […]

        A confession: twelve years ago, I passed up a Walter Mosley book because it did not sound like his usual edgy, sharply intelligent adventure. I love his honesty, his refusal to trade humanity for fancy flourishes. But I also love the characters: the lucid wit of Socrates Fortlow, the laidback sexiness […]

      Tempting as it would be to go back to that celeb chatbot and ask if it expected such a flurry of attention, I need a breather from all these human-interviews-the-AI stories. Alternately fascinated and terrified, wowed and cynical, I have finally settled down to the kindergarten-level realization that it is smarter than […]

        James Eads How was the grandson of James Buchanan Eads, designer of the world-famous Eads Bridge. James Eads How lived as a hobo. His bindle (bedroll) was a black and white buffalo plaid, tied to a stick. At least, that is how it was represented in Warehouse 13, a science fiction […]

        Pity Lizzie Gottlieb. Daughter of one of the finest book editors of the twentieth century, she is fascinated by his prickly but immensely fruitful relationship with Robert Caro, one of the most influential historians of the twentieth century. She wants to make a documentary about that relationship. Neither man will allow […]

  “We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.”― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose   A book can change your life. But a rare and mysterious book, one with secrets not yet fathomed? A book like that can own you. The Rule of Four is a New York […]

Volcanoes can destroy our cities, burn away our flesh, suffocate us with toxic gases, crush us with flying boulders. Most volcanologists keep a safe distance from their subject. But they still emerge rapt.

        I have always loved the phrasing used in India after someone dies: “He is no more.” Stark, simple, powerful. The being has ended. Compare that to our various euphemisms. “Passing” can also suggest deception, pretending to be White or female or whatever might prove an advantage. Or traveling—“I’m just passing through”—but […]

        Let us end our time travel with death, the most revealing state of all. There was no privacy between the 1860s and 1880s; one learned from the newspaper exactly what ailed one’s neighbors. An awful lot of dropsy, the swelling we now call edema, and specifically, dropsy of the heart; also […]

        The Civil War was over. Reconstruction had begun. How were Blacks faring in rural Missouri? The editor of the Jefferson Democrat does not sound like a wholesale bigot, but he wrote within a societal grid of long-established prejudice, wariness, and condescension. In 1871, for example, the newspaper reported: “Two Negro Militiamen […]

        From old issues of the Jefferson Democrat, painstakingly transcribed for the Jefferson County Historical Society, we can extract the gentle amusements of life in these parts a century and a half ago. If you fancied yourself “book-larned,” there were debates: “Question—Resolved that man is the architect of his own fortune.” (Six […]

    Someone far more altruistic than I has transcribed old issues of the Jefferson Democrat word by word, starting a little before the 1870s and ending a little after, for the Jefferson County Historical Society. You cannot find this amalgamation of humor, tragedy, scandal, poignancy, derring-do, and sweet quirkiness in all of Netflix. And […]

        The entire world is short-staffed these days, all of us fed up with working. Thoreau would grin and ask what took us so long. He swiftly figured out how to work only one day a week for his few necessities and use the rest of his time to do his own […]

        Nothing nags at you like an overdue book. For half a century, I have dwelt in an unreasonable terror of that ten-cent fine. There were changes along the way, of course. Online renewing thrilled me—this was all I had to do? Click a box? But oh, when someone else wanted that […]

        Alan Lightman is an astrophysicist with the soul of a Buddhist poet. Except he does not believe in souls. He is a materialist who goes about having spiritual experiences his science cannot quite…yet…explain. Professor of the Practice of the Humanities at MIT, he made his scientific chops with a succession of […]

        Saturday morning, my to-do list hit the seesaw in my sleepy brain (snooze again? get up? snooze?) and bounced me out of bed. Moving briskly, I made my husband’s coffee and smoothie, fed and walked the dog, did the grocery shopping, dropped stuff off at the recycling center and the thrift […]