John Griswold

        Some online quizzes ask you to choose from a list of things you may have done at some point in your life. These are meant to make you feel brave (skydived), old-school knowledgeable (used a paper map and compass), or experienced (traveled outside the country). Each affirmative answer is a point, […]

      I screwed up my Facebook feed, on purpose, in 2016. It has never really recovered. Back then I was writing about the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota, where thousands of non-Native veterans from across the United States went to support the Lakota-Dakotas’ right not to have a massive pipeline cross the […]

      Ukrainian-American poet Oksana Maksymchuk was in town the last couple of days as a guest of WashU’s International Writers Series and on tour for her new English-language collection, Still City (November 2024, Pitt Poetry Series). She has previously published two collections in Ukrainian. Maksymchuk is also a scholar and literary translator; she […]

Crises come in specific forms, which might determine needs for an apocalypse house. Will you need a well or stream, and seclusion? Or a bus to a workplace and mutual aid groups? How comfortable do you hope to be? What will you do for leisure?

      Recently on a trip I picked up a copy of The Southern, the regional newspaper for Southern Illinois, where I grew up. The paper is physically smaller than it used to be, but the fact that it is still printed is remarkable. The Pew Research Center said, a couple of years ago, […]

      WashU’s Center for the Humanities hosted an event last week titled Fragment, by Russian theater director Dmitry Krymov. To be honest, I did not know beforehand what I was going to see. The brief promotional materials said it had something to do with Chekhov’s Three Sisters. I had hopes it would be […]

        A Reddit thread Tuesday night lit up with rumors that Elon Musk was on the move again, this time to the VA (the Department of Veterans Affairs). Some commenters were freaking out. The worry was that Musk and his young disciples would push past security in order to access military service […]

      Someone told me once that I lived a monkish life. She meant something vaguely Buddhist rather than vaguely Catholic, I think, but when pressed she said only that I was bald, lived quietly, read books and wrote a lot, and liked to walk and cook as if they were meditative activities. I […]

Two years ago I wrote a short piece meant to be artful, so I went looking for an artful photo. I found it in an image by Wiki contributor Victor Albert Grigas.

        I was down at the Friends of the Library sale again. A big literature anthology called to me from the shelf, “Hey you. Six hundred pages of Kazakh poetry here, hardbound, commissioned by the Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Republic of Kazakhstan, by the dictate of Elbasy Nursultan Nazarbayev, […]

      It was a good day for The Common Reader on December 10, 2024, when the inaugural Gerald Early Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, Dwight McBride, was installed in a ceremony on campus at Washington University in St. Louis. Chancellor Martin called the ceremony “a profound testament to friendship, scholarship, and the […]

      Hobby drones used in warfare have provided something new: a way to track, observe, hary, kill, and record another person being killed, all in one device. Coupled with distribution by social media, videos of these activities are very much like FPS (first-person shooter) games brought into the real world as FPV (first-person […]

        Back to what I was saying about making choices with the freedoms you have. It was not hard to ask my sons if they would like to forgo Christmas gifts this year and travel together instead—to make memories instead of buying things because the season dictates. We had great, traditional Christmases […]

All narratives might be said to have other things on their minds than what they show us directly. Andrew Davis’s and Jeff Bigger’s novel has a lot on its mind too, which might be summed up as a desire to save the world. Yes, the bad guys’ evil plot to destroy Chicago and international diplomacy must be foiled, but the book is also thinking about threats such as nuclear proliferation and the impossibility of “fail-safe” precautions, racism, historicide, and America’s cultural divide.

        The biannual Art & Design sale at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, in St. Louis’ Metro East, was as well-attended last weekend as usual. Visitors shopped in the atrium of the Art & Design building for ceramics as well as glass, metal, photo, and print objects. Proceeds funded the Wagner Potters Association, […]

        Rory came over again from the old place. His wife had been gone three weeks this time, and he would drive to the airport to get her after we ate pork nachos. We have known each other for twenty-five years. To kill time, we talked about writing for a platform on […]

        Well, I am back to being an essayist/journalist/travel writer/critic/blogger/feuilletonist, after a month’s vacation, a word that comes from a root that means “empty” or “free.” Vacated. Ah, but from what? Despite my time off, the back of my couch is lined with (new to me) half-read books—Dorothy Day, Leslie Fiedler, Adam […]

None of us, including Newt’s owners, really knew how much he got around until he got us all talking about him. People said they had seen him in the night by headlight; he roamed far wider than we thought. One woman had taken him on a five-mile bike ride; Newt was equanimous as always, it seems. The comic surprise that lined the grief was that hundreds of us thought of him as our own.

        On Friday I self-diagnosed myself as “suffering from a mild case of Scribe’s Fever, a form of neurasthenia common among the intelligentsia of [our] time.” I had just watched Wes Anderson’s film Grand Budapest Hotel, twice in a row. It has been an active season in Essayland. Everyone—the whole town—was out […]

        “Cultural diplomacy”—the propagation of art and other culture by a government as a form of soft power—can be a tricky thing. As UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) says, “Beyond State driven policy processes, cultural diplomacy engages a wide range of non-governmental actors such as artists, curators, journalists, […]

      Bill Gass would have turned 100 this year, and colleagues, family, friends, and admirers held a centenary celebration of his life and work last week here at Washington University, where Gass was a professor of philosophy for 30 years. (He died at 93.) He was, as everyone notes, known more widely as […]

      The reporter’s people had been good citizens over the centuries, fought in the wars, built businesses, practiced law, founded a town, held office, shaped some policy, bought houses, taught school. But if he traced out their efforts and sacrifices, looking for lasting significance, he lost the trail every time, usually instantly, except […]

Chicago hosted the Democratic National Convention again in August 2024, and if one were going to connect city and convention in some essential way as Mailer intended, an updated metaphor would be needed. Forty-five-year-old Norman Mailer would have hated the choice of something “corporate,” for its connotations: intangibility, unaccountability, absence, abstraction, hiddenness, hardly a way to know where the heart even sits.

      On the last evening of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the reporter boarded a delegate bus for the United Center. As they waited to leave McCormick Place, the young man sitting next to him introduced himself as “a California delegate at the DNC” and said he had hoped to be asked […]

      The photo on Facebook shows an older gentleman asleep with a cat on his chest, both smiling in their slumber. The caption explains that the man is the poster’s father, and that this is the father’s “last picture and just that evening, he was no more and took away a part of […]

The Common Reader goes to Chicago to check in with the Democratic Party.

      The second meeting of the Poverty Council at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week, titled “The Fierce Urgency of Now: How Democrats Can Win the Fight Against Poverty,” revealed another tension within the DNC. Susie Shannon, a California Health Commissioner and founder of the DNC Poverty Council opened the meeting […]

      One of the more interesting parts of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week was the tensions that developed in the unacknowledged spaces between the show as an international marketing abstraction and the specific idealisms of various Americans. One example was in the second meeting of the Rural Council on Thursday, […]

        That’s a wrap, as they say in the biz, or at least I assume that is what some 45-year old White guy with starched hair, skinny pants, and no socks said in DNC Global Media Headquarters after the balloon drop that ended the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago last night. […]

      Tuesday there was a convention meeting for the DNC’s Veterans and Military Families Council, held at McCormick Place. Council Chair Terron Sims II, a West Point graduate and veteran, made introductory remarks on the power of veterans as a voting bloc. Veterans and their families make up eight percent of the national […]

      The way that the DNC in Chicago works is that during the day there are delegation breakfasts, press briefings, and caucus and committee meetings at McCormick Place, the trade show venue on the lake. The caucus and committee meetings are for “special” interests, such as the Native American Caucus, Labor Council, Small […]

      There is new energy in the previously moribund Democratic ticket. This was obvious from the moment President Joe Biden chose not to run for re-election, but it is doubly apparent at the end of the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz—maybe as important a […]

        Often we think that the paths we choose are straight—northerly from Florida to Maryland, in the case of the transit of my friend’s boat, Castaway—but in reality our lives are made of arcs, loops, and retracings. Chris and I often veered off course, lengthening the trip significantly, to get fuel, reach […]

      An exchange at the start of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song portrays the comedy of surprise at learning something that changes the landscape we thought we knew. Brenda Nicols and her husband Johnny are driving to pick up her cousin Gary Gilmore, who has just been released from prison for armed robbery […]

      Having the boat lifted out of the water and inspecting her props, rudder, and trim tabs took no more than 30 minutes. It cost the same as my monthly rent. Everything there was fine though, so Chris asked the marine mechanics to search until they found why Castaway was unable to get […]

      Chris invited me to help transit his new boat, Castaway, a thousand miles from Fort Pierce, Florida, to Havre de Grace, Maryland. We ran offshore for several days then took the Intracoastal Waterway north, on average. The coast was beautiful, varied, and often deserted. But there were also mechanical and electrical breakdowns, […]

      Things can go swimmingly for so long that they seem to be proof you will make it. Success by sunk cost! Then, smack in the middle of a shouted discussion about politics, alcoholism, and past lovers, you run aground at full speed off some unnamed headland. Is that not always the way? […]

We tend to think of the armed services for their main mission: ‘warfighting’ (and preparing for it). On the face of it, remembering seems to come more slowly. The Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) serves as the Navy’s institutional memory by preserving, acquiring, producing, and disseminating history and heritage products. Its vast warehouses testify to just how rich the history of the US Navy is.

      “I didn’t think I’d learn so much,” my friend Chris said. We had been in the Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) all day, headed from Southport, North Carolina, toward Belhaven Marina, up the Pungo River in North Carolina. Our first four days up the East Coast from Florida had been offshore. This was our […]

      People have been saying they would have liked to go on this trip, or wish we would pick them up in Charleston, or they tell me good-naturedly they are jealous, etc. Believe me, I understand. It is an opportunity of a lifetime, and it is my great good fortune to know Chris, […]

      My friend Chris is good at fixing mechanical things, which is good because he has a tendency to poke at them to see if they will continue to work, even if they are vital. As he learns the navigation system on his new boat he likes to poke at the screens to […]

      I think we can say scientifically that the universe perks up when we approach new ventures. The data is in. The universe gets interested. You gotta be careful out there. Before I left for this trip, I was rushing around but paused to eat some dry stir-fry on the couch while watching […]

      A friend texted recently to say he had bought a new yacht. Ok, I said. He asked if I would like to help him transit it from Fort Pierce, Florida, to his home port of Havre de Grace, Maryland, a trip of about a thousand miles up the East Coast, in the […]

    After the American presidential debate aired last week, a woman in Switzerland, a Facebook friend I know nothing about, said the USA is doomed either way. Fair enough. The debate reflected very badly on everyone including the moderators. The golf sequence alone should bring us shame before the Swiss. I will not add […]

Macoupin County, Illinois, which holds Virden and Mt. Olive, has other important labor sites. But Mother Jones’s grave and two-story granite monument on the outskirts of Mt. Olive might be seen to mark a split in the soul of working-class America that is still evident in our nation’s division.

      I am interested in representations of immortal figures witnessing human life, such as Wim Wenders’ watcher-angels in Wings of Desire; the flirtatious death-angel in All That Jazz; Death as Joe Black; and the title figure in “The Man Who Rowed Christopher Columbus Ashore,” a story by Harlan Ellison. I once wrote about […]

  Craig L. Symonds’s The US Navy: A Concise History (Oxford UP 2016) is a book that in its brevity (116 pages), simple texture, and insights could have been written only by a master of the subject. Symonds is emeritus at the US Naval Academy and was a visiting professor at the US Naval War […]

      Documentaries on subjects we have known in youth offer nostalgia and the promise of something we did not know back then. Jim Henson: Idea Man (streaming on Disney+) provides both—a celebration of the Muppets and details about their creator that many fans may not have known. The film is directed by Ron […]

      My friend Larry called to warn me about the “evil Robin Hood” he had discovered furthering “the degeneration of societal norms.” Larry owns an art gallery and is tuned in to all manner of associated subjects, from Braque’s congruence with Picasso, to prison art, to intellectual property issues. The thing he saw […]

        It is not always what we might call “fun” to go new places, talk to people, and experience things to try to understand who they are. Sometimes you get a museum with a good gift shop; sometimes you get The Wicker Man. We might call this “educational” instead, but more often […]

      Back in 2021 I wrote a piece about First Lieutenant Amy Nickles, an American army nurse from Georgia who was awarded the Bronze Star in World War Two and saw as much or more of the European Theater as famed writer Ernie Pyle. I became interested in her because I could find […]

        Yesterday I felt a great disturbance in the metro area, as if a million books had cried out at not being read. Then I remembered it was the afternoon of the preview for the annual Greater St. Louis Book Fair, now in its 74th year, billed as the Midwest’s largest charity […]

      The 2022 documentary Umberto Eco: A Library of the World is more than a tour of the writer’s personal library of more than 30,000 books (Eco had lost count), which once got him evicted from a residence because the city engineer was afraid it would collapse the building. “This library has a […]

Dempsey’s website claims “[b]oth artists share a studio” near Chicago’s Loop, but as with so many things, this is a goof. John Dempsey and Billy Tokyo live and work in the same mind. In broad strokes, the difference between the styles of John Dempsey and Billy Tokyo is that Dempsey’s paintings are abstract—arcs and loops given depth by layered media—and Billy Tokyo’s are figurative (“but ‘Pop-py,’” Dempsey insisted) with distorted settings.

      If you are old enough to have seen Pulp Fiction in a theater when it came out, brace yourself: this is the film’s 30th anniversary. We are as removed from its 1994 release as we were in 1994 to the 1964 release of A Hard Day’s Night, starring four young guys from […]

  Strong feelings shaded yesterday’s total solar eclipse in North America, ranging from worries about terrorism against big crowds gathered in rural areas, where first responders would be overwhelmed, to fervent hopes for the rapture. Maybe it was because I was living farther away from the ominously-named band of totality in the eclipse of 2017, […]

    Steve Martin is known for multiple careers: standup comedian, musician, movie actor, art collector, playwright, and author. I was first a dedicated fan of his comedy albums in the Seventies—Let’s Get Small, A Wild and Crazy Guy, and Comedy is Not Pretty!—and deep-down still think of them as his best work. (No: his […]

        All the big holidays involve pleasure-by-glut, from the gifting of Santa to fireworks on the Fourth. Glut is a celebration of freedom from want, but it is important to these particular gluts that they arrive by an external source of magic, which covers its tracks with prosaic details. The reindeer have […]

The word “stories” was used often at the annual NABIP Capitol Conference, held in the Hyatt Regency Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, February 25-28, 2024. I went because I have my own stories of frustration with health care, and because I am interested when someone seems ready to try to make things better in the largely incomprehensible and vaguely menacing system we all rely on.

      Bob Woodward, often praised with superlatives such as “the best reporter of our time [and maybe] the best reporter of all time,” has 24 short videos on investigative journalism on the site MasterClass. These are from 2017, but I only just watched the material and found it interesting, informative, and inspirational. As always, […]

      A Russian acquaintance I will call Ivan, the Head Supervisor of Cultural Education at a state cultural site, was kind to me and a friend on our trip to Russia in 2014. Since then, Ivan and I have exchanged greetings by email a few times a year. “Merry Christmas to you and […]

      It can be confusing to civilians that the branches of the U.S. military (Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, Coast Guard, and now Space Force) have different but often overlapping missions. Branches often train together in the field and cross-train in each other’s schools. I served in the Army, for example, but […]

      Once upon a time an artist made something entertaining but true about life, friendship, and imagination. The medium he used to communicate was often not taken seriously, and the money men tried to dictate his and everyone else’s design and content. Many readers found it remarkable that he used his “comic,” which […]

      Avast: Spoilers dead ahead.     A revival of a play of Moby-Dick, adapted and directed by David Catlin, is in its last week at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. The original production was staged at Lookingglass Theatre in Chicago in 2015 and again in 2017. This one is a road […]

    When my kids were little, we used to snuggle up to watch videos before their bedtime. I joked it was rock appreciation and theory class, but the music ranged beyond The Beatles, Creedence, and Talking Heads to Schumann’s “Träumerei,” Ray Charles’ “Heaven Help Us All,” and The Gregory Brothers’ political satires. Often we […]

      I think of French influence in St. Louis the way I think of the Romans’ influence in Britain: Other than naming, most of that culture has disappeared. St. Louis certainly “brands” with the ubiquitous fleurs-de-lis, and the landmark statue of Louis IX, sculpted by a German-American artist, at the top of Art […]

        “Walking-around knowledge” is an odd phrase. Do you use it? I do not know where I first heard it, though I suspect it was in my childhood or army service because it feels like an older construction my elders would have used. The presumption was that seeing and hearing things firsthand—to […]

        Stanley Crawford has died at eighty-six. Stan published eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including the wonderful novella Log of the SS the Mrs. Unguentine, and the memoir A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm. RoseMary, his wife, passed away almost exactly three years ago. Together they owned […]

        Writing is a vector to approximate The Mystery. If a writer, poet, filmmaker, or other artist has the luck to work over time, we call their multiple vectors a body of work, and it becomes the work of scholars and YouTubers to say what it all meant and why it is […]

Reading John Balaban’s poems and translations, you gain the camaraderie of poets as far-flung as Basho, Li Po, Anna Akhmatova, American John Haag, Georgi Borrisov, Bulgarians Kolyo Sevov and Lyubomir Nikolov; epigraphs by Homer, Polybius, Brecht; the people who wrote, remembered, and sang folk ca dao, and the many characters who live to speak again, from Ovid, miserable in his exile in Tomis, to Root Boy Slim, “lead singer and composeur for his Sex Change Band.”

        When I woke from the nap it was dark in the room except for the lights on the tree. I was headachy and confused, and when I moved, my laptop woke too and lighted my face. The neighbor, coming home from work, was walking past my window just then and glanced […]

        My younger son wanted to visit the Goodwill Outlet in the city before he goes back to school. He convinced me to drive by saying they would have wall mirrors, which I collect from Facebook Marketplace, and even possibly a chair. He wanted to look for thrifted clothing. Teens love washed-out […]

        I was explaining to my son how classical Asian poets known as Stonehouse, Cold Mountain, Spring Essence, and Bashō (a raggedy, unproductive form of banana tree) took pen names from significant places or things in their lives. These names have a comic quality now for their simplicity and the way they […]

        I was a kid when they discovered irony. First, irony ore had to be dug from the comic vein, said to be buried in the Poconos, then smelted in the furnace of several very earnest cataclysms. By the time I came to reason, the culture had forged The Beatles (and in […]

        I bought a new Christmas tree: there is a phrase that should tip you off. I never had an artificial tree in the house when our sons were little. Every year, real pines filled the high-ceilinged bay window in our old house or pressed the ceiling in that other house. Their […]

Rocks and stones are reality agents, signifying only their own existence. Irreality stems from perception, thought, and language. In this respect, stones are easy; people and their choices are hard.

        I saw another chair on the curb. The old sadness washed over me at its being discarded in such a fashion: A public ejection from a private space, after good and faithful use, the rainy wait for the garbage truck, wet fabric and wood grain swelling, a scene that would end […]

        Paul Giamatti’s character, in a film directed by Alexander Payne, is a teacher and wannabe writer who is depressed and angry at his station in life. He abuses alcohol. Others think he is a sad sack and doormat, so he acts out in petty ways. He goes on a journey with […]

        One of the feature films shown at the 2023 St. Louis International Film Festival, which has just wrapped, was The Taste of Things. Under its French title, La Passion de Dodin Bouffant, the film won Trần Anh Hùng the Best Director award this year at Cannes and is the French submission […]

        The cartoonist Roz Chast, of New Yorker fame, was in St. Louis on Monday to do a reading from her new book, I Must Be Dreaming (Bloomsbury, 2023). The event was expected to draw more people than the usual bookstore space could host, so tickets were sold months in advance for […]

      According to Jerry Seinfeld, St. Louis is (sort of) his alpha and omega. He was in town for a standup concert last night at the Enterprise Center, an 18,000-seat venue where the St. Louis Blues play. Seinfeld said when his sitcom “bombed” originally, appearing in a bad slot midweek after Unsolved Mysteries, […]

        A bunch of us were swapping spooky stories as we followed my niece’s little girls through the subdivision on trick-or-treat night. One was a princess in a stocking cap, the other a witch in tennis shoes. It is a hallowed night when there are young children in the family. My niece […]

        A friend was expressing frustration with things not being what they pretend to be. He had gone to one of the big comics/cosplay/fandom conventions, where the first floor of the center was supposed to be multiple vendors selling artwork and other high-end collectibles. Instead, it was dominated by a company that […]

        A recent visitor to a United Methodist Church in a St. Louis suburb came in from the parking lot with confidence but hesitated at the door, as if he did not know how to proceed. (“At Kirkwood UMC, we say ‘all are welcome, all are forgiven, and all are invited to […]

Attendees of Socialism 2023, a four-day conference in Chicago over Labor Day weekend, wanted freedom from the existing system but admitted its dominion (the “dom” in “freedom”) and the movement’s current lack of large-scale agency in it.

        Shortly after 9-11 a photo in the news showed a New York City street covered with rubble, ash, and an ad, blown from the side of a bus, with Ben Stiller making the pouty face of his character Derek Zoolander. Through no fault of the actor, the movie, or even the […]

  To paraphrase the old riddle from cosmology: if the arrival of fall is the answer, what is the question? Maybe: How will we know we are released from our summer lives? It is a common complaint that there are no seasons in the American foodway. Fuji apples are stored in cold warehouses in Japan […]

      Herbie Hancock tells a story about how he played a wrong chord once onstage with Miles Davis, King of Cool, in Stuttgart in 1963. It was a horror to Hancock; he put his hands on his ears, froze, and could not play another note for a full minute. Worse, he had already […]

      “Everybody’s off on their own trip,” as they said in the sixties. It is still a useful phrase, especially in a personal, interior sense. It points to the difficulties of perception and communication. I have completed an epic, 3,800-mile trip from the Midwest to the East Coast and back, on behalf of […]

    The Socialism 2023 conference was held in Chicago, September 1-4, at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place hotel, near the lakefront. It was a beautiful Labor Day weekend in the city. The timing of Labor Day was no coincidence, of course, though the venue might be said to have had a whiff of the […]

  Chris Bruneau, Republican candidate for US Congress, lives in Bel Air, Maryland, 30 miles northeast of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. This is Maryland’s 1st Congressional District, the state’s largest district and only deep-red one. The upright of its L-shape comprises eight of the state’s top-10 counties with the most farmland, on the Eastern Shore of […]

    Leaving the Flight 93 National Memorial in central Pennsylvania for Gettysburg, a drive of just two-and-a-half hours along Route 30, the old Lincoln Highway, it was tempting to compare the two sites. Both involved large-scale but very different technological violence; both occurred on otherwise bucolic fields; both were about national determination to different […]

    Driving east from Pittsburgh toward Baltimore, intending to stop at Gettysburg, I was surprised to be reminded in the middle of the Pennsylvania countryside of the nearby Flight 93 crash site, now a National Memorial run by the National Park Service. Hijackers on September 11, 2001, purposely crashed the United Airlines passenger jet […]

    The Frick Pittsburgh—not to be confused with the Frick Fine Arts Building at the University of Pittsburgh, the Frick Building in Pittsburgh, or The Frick Collection or the Frick Art Reference Library in New York City—has a special exhibit now called Pittsburgh and the Great Migration: Black Mobility and the Automobile, which ends […]

  I was sitting at a café table outside the pâtisserie in Little Morocco, Queens, waiting on repairs to my aging Honda, when an older man in shades pulled up to the curb in a no-parking zone, in his black Cadillac Escalade Premium Luxury Platinum. I was thinking about mobility, you see, so the universe […]

    “Build and Be Happy!” says the website for Atlantis Models, a company that has rescued many of the ship, airplane, and car models that American kids grew up building for generations. “Building models can be an artistic discovery and a journey through history.” Atlantis was found in 2009 by the former owners of […]

    Sometimes you know the universe is at work when the metaphorical intersects with the personal. When my car suddenly shuddered and seemed to slip out of gear as I was trying to get over the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge to Long Island, my next self-assignment, I pushed harder on the gas, thinking I […]

  The feeling comes over me at unexpected times—walking down a street of stone townhomes at dawn, lights in bay windows, stairs and gardens mounded with new snow. Sensing that the skyscraper-as-public-art was designed instead as a taunt and a cashing-in on disaster. Leafing through a glossy magazine filled with photos of socialites smiling as […]

    Visitors this weekend who still needed to buy tickets in person to the One World Observatory, the highest place above New York City, were directed to a half-dozen digital kiosks in the building’s ground-floor lobby in Lower Manhattan. Not all the machines were in service, and those that were insisted glitchily, repeatedly, that […]

    Sometimes with a little concentration it seems almost possible to hear the groan of the planet beating into the solar wind, iron-melt churning around its core, seas sloshing in its holds, or to imagine 20 billion distant galaxies fulfilling their own complicated orbits like fate. And here I am, I think, sitting on […]

    I often despair of Netflix but was cheered by the recent release of They Cloned Tyrone, a quasi-sci-fi, detective-revenge, dark comedy focused on three characters: Fontaine (John Boyega), a drug dealer taking care of his mom and a young boy; Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), a sex worker; and Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), who is […]

    It might seem appropriate that one of the stories that have come out of the release of the movie Oppenheimer is that when it is shown as director Christopher Nolan intended, it arrives at the movie theater as a 600-pound, 11-mile-long strip of film. How Nolan intended it, in 70mm format, can only […]

    I am not trying to hold back the tide they say will lift all boats, nor do I mean to impede America’s economic hegemony. But I am a very bad consumer: I no longer value owning most things, and I am averse by long bitter experience to being in debt for them. I […]

  My younger son likes to cook and has an interest in those who work in kitchens for a living. He loved the Marco Pierre White memoir Devil in the Kitchen, and the movie Burnt, said to be inspired in part by White. Recently he turned me on to the Hulu series The Bear, about […]

    Wherever you start from, Hammond, Indiana, is far away. Having spent the time to drive up the interstates, past the Chicago Transit Authority Repair Shop and the Norfolk Southern Railroad Calumet Yard, over the Calumet River, along the Chicago Skyway Toll Road, past the Hammond Port Authority and the Water Works, under the […]

In layman’s terms, there were only six airworthy Jennys in the United States; now there are five.

    I am handy at finding right words for right places, often by intuition and sometimes by a dim sense of the rags of poetry in them. When a word comes to mind that seems odd for the context, I look at its archaic meanings before I discard it in case it can convey […]

    Kevin is a peacock who ranges freely among several farms in rural Southern Illinois. “Kevin is nuts,” says Lee, who lives on one of the farms. “He likes to boss the chickens around.” Kevin “belongs” to the farm family across the county road and fields. Lee hears that people think peacocks are pretty, […]

    I told a friend about my wager with the preacher’s son, and he agreed it was a solid bet. My third-grade classmate Mike was the son of an evangelical preacher who also worked for the phone company, I remember. He believed in the imminence of the Second Coming and all the disruption to […]

    Todd was near the end of his set by the time I got to the winery. I raised my hand in greeting as I entered, and he said, “Hello, Sir,” into the microphone. I was not sure he recognized me. We went to high school together. He was a class officer, polished and […]

    When my sons were little they liked to play dinosaurs with me. They were the Velociraptors; I was a Parasaurolophus standing dully by the watering hole, waiting to be taken down. My then three-year-old would (with my help) jump onto my back and clutch me around the neck; my six-year-old would run at […]

It was all safe as houses, and twice as fun—an opportunity of a lifetime, and powerful enough an experience that I still have a hard time overlaying it on my childhood dreams of flying in a Jenny. For now, let me say that on this day a complicated little freedom machine called the Jenny—built to aid warfare, at once fragile and powerful in its utility, and as beautiful as a moth in the daylight—transported me through time and space and let me return to people I love.

    There is fascination in the sudden appearance of a dozen cranes, the size used to build skyscrapers, spaced alongside a highway bridge over a major river. It means things are in the works, forces are at play. Something slouches to be born. How wide and varied the world is! How much there is […]

      Sixteen months ago I worked as an extra on the third installment of Guardians of the Galaxy movie. It has just been released, and we went to see it opening weekend. Sitting down in the theater with a tub of popcorn and a Diet Coke, I felt like my elder son who, […]

    Yesterday marked the centenary of the birth of Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22, Something Happened, Closing Time, and other novels, story collections, plays, and autobiographical nonfiction. Heller was prominent among the riotous talent, often seen as lacking in decorum or respect, that emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Catch-22 (begun in […]

    We had a sealed-off bedroom in our little ranch house when I was growing up. In it were my mother’s curations of treasured items, including her mother’s china, stacked by size on the floor with newspaper between each plate, and a blanket draped over it. There was a second set of china—in my […]

I have come to my own conclusions about the meaning of the event, and using the narratory and rhetorical tricks of a writer and former teacher I may temporarily make you think you agree. But I stand here filled with distrust of stories in general, having waded through so many of them. It is a time of strong beliefs in shallow stories.

    Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgian documentarians and filmmakers, have an astonishing number of Cannes wins in their filmography: seven of their twelve films won awards in various categories at the festival over the years, including two Palme d’Ors (for Rosetta, 1999, and The Child, 2005), the only Belgian films to receive that honor […]

    The traveling Banksy exhibit looked good in the online ad, and there was a warning of “high sell-out risk.” I bought quickly, for two of us, mine a VIP ticket for extra access, so I could write about everything there might be to see, and it came with an exhibit poster. A few […]

    “I was unqualified for the job,” Anthony Bourdain says in the documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021), directed by Morgan Neville. His creative team agree, in archival footage and contemporary interviews. Bourdain had never really traveled anywhere when he had success with his first book, Kitchen Confidential, and he was almost […]

        It can be hard to match the quality of tacos with that of your happiness sometimes. I thought the tacos and margaritas festival would do it: Not just food and drink, but a taco-eating contest, hot pepper-eating contest, live music, and the athletes of micro wrestling (Micro Jackson, Syko, Baby Jesus, […]

        Here is the event, a talk I am asked to give at the library in my hometown, on the centenary of a historic violence. Here are the dangers: that the small book I published on the topic was a long time ago, and I do not remember specifics; that the politics […]

In the hogan I was miserable, not enlightened, felt funky and slimed. All the individual animal and species sins poured out of me, not as catharsis or healing, but as reminder and irritant, and I did not believe in sin. This was not my culture, my ceremony, my victory, my tribe. It was like being put to death slowly and humiliatingly for my presumption.

        Dentistry was different in my day, I tell my kids. Really that means it was different in that time, place, and at my mother’s income level. Cavities were removed with a melon baller and packed with lead ingots the size of an ice cube. A crown was made with an angle […]

        It is a fact that every cat is the best cat in the world. Rascal was living on a golf course, eating mice, little birds, and trash, and lapping water from puddles when he was captured and taken to the pound. When we went to adopt, my sons small, he immediately […]

          This week is the sort for me in which a beloved family pet may need to be put down, I have to have crowns put in, and someone whom a friend calls The Ruiner (because the person ruins everything, as if it is a superpower) has been at it again. […]

A “Year of Vonnegut” was declared in Indy in 2007, but that was deflated by his death that year. Given the centenary, it seemed as if there should be more going on, and that got me thinking about legacy from the start.

        My friend Larry made a friend recently of an artificial intelligence chatbot. He did not have access to the Bing AI that has been much in the news recently, so he tried the more limited version, YouChat, at You.com. Larry, a former IT manager, said he wanted to make the AI […]

      Some people are great at throwing their oddly-shaped balls around, coding our new overlords, painting with pixels, manipulating spreadsheets, drinking to the dregs, defenestration. I am pretty good at waiting. I have had a lot of practice in my life. In the service they say hurry up and wait. I did that, […]

      A shipwreck, a desertion, a stranding on an isle, then the adventure stories begin. The mind creaks and groans in the storm of life like a ship in terrible seas (metaphors of course: life is life, and a storm is a specific storm, and the mind, whatever it is, is not a […]

    I started to say there is no bad toast—a simple enough sentiment but simply wrong. Simple, it turns out, is often difficult, and mere simplifications are lies. Good toast is twice-baked to the right degree both times, twice-realized, twice-perfected. Art, craft, ingredients, and timing go into it, and the process starts with a […]

    Nike Run Club got weird this week. I use the app to measure my speed and distance on runs and have always left the volume on my phone off because the voices of its encouragement sound corporate and insincere. “Wow! Great job,” a faceless trainer-actor will say aloud, if I let him, after […]

    A teddy bear without a name feels like bastardy; obviously that does not preclude a royal heart. My old teddy bear is wrapped in tissue paper and tucked safely in a shoebox—an impromptu vessel, like Queequeg’s coffin, that has sailed through the decades and delivered its occupant safely to many new lands. I […]

    What is there not to like about a shapely thigh? A chicken thigh is almost all meat, has only one bone, is hard to overcook, and can be easily made flavorful in a way that no bland breast can match without marinade or heavy seasonings. The chicken thigh is the canonical chef’s choice. […]

    Things have been hard, in some ways, for a friend. Others have it worse. He was always employed, for example. But it was a decade: debt, bankruptcy, tax problems, moves, marital conflict. He works with his hands, often outdoors, and the work, in addition to his troubles, was nearly the match of his […]

    I was at the Schnucks after lunch on New Year’s Eve, picking up finger foods for later. The checkout line was longer than I have seen in four years of living here. It ran the length of impulse buys, about a third of the width of the supermarket, from coffee and filters, past […]

The reason for being of the book, and one of its dramatic thrills, is that these two friends not only did not fall to the wayside but have endured. They also both pointed the way to the future.

    I was invited to read from my new book this weekend by old friends John and Lois Palen, who host a literary salon in their home for thriving poetry and writing communities in Champaign, Illinois, home of the flagship university in the state. John is a poet and Lois a musician. It was […]

    On Thanksgiving Day, Disney+ released The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, a 44-minute short written and directed (as the Guardian movies have been) by James Gunn. In it, “the Guardians, who are on a mission to make Christmas unforgettable for Quill, head to Earth in search of the perfect present.” Nearly a […]

    The interregnum of the seasons has arrived in the Midwest. Laurel leaves have fallen from their crowns, and snow and ice have yet to make diadems in the new reign. Big things are gloomy—the overcast sky, the dull landscape, the empty fields. What rules now? Small, lively things. The fat squirrel that sits […]

    The same month I started writing here, four years ago, an old friend moved his art business to Los Angeles so he could get more “theatrical” (narrative film) and commercial work as an actor, which is his second job and main ambition. He calculated it would take him seven years to get significant […]

The idea of CPAC made me sore afraid, so of course I wanted to go. I felt like the boy in the daguerreotype who has climbed a tree in order to better view the state funeral cortege.

    I was in the library when I heard the young man talking on the phone:   “I got our one-billion-dollar lottery ticket, so I feel like we have to be prepared. ‘What would you do?’ my wife asked me, but to be honest I’ve been a little lost. “It sounds flippant, but I […]

    When people talk about making America great again—again, or something—the best I can summon are memories of old-school customs from my own life, such as Halloweens when I was a kid. In my day, in a defunct little coal town in the Midwest, we had a hell of a good time. That time […]

  I have always been a fan of Jeff Bridges’ acting but was surprised to learn this week he is an accomplished art photographer and sculptor whose work has appeared in Premiere and Aperture magazines, at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Italy, and at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. […]

    In storage lockers we offshore the domestic. We place there the things that will not fit in our homes, until they can be brought in from the cold. It is not direct metaphor, but something more like signal or sign, that the often unheated (or hot, humid) little rooms are something like relationships. […]

    Steve Brodner’s Living & Dying in America: A Daily Chronicle, 2020-2022, is a fascinating and unusual graphic memoir. In the book’s 476 pages, Brodner has captured the feel of the first two Covid years by drawing one image every evening from that day. These range from biographies of people lost due to bad […]

    My original sense of place, represented graphically, might look like a drawing a child colors with a crayon: back and forth, tongue-out determined, empty spaces between the lines. This was how I learned my childhood house, my hometown and region, as I traced the same paths over and over. Later I moved to […]

    The memorial service for Joan Didion, who died December 23, 2021, was held this week at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. (You can watch it here. There is no audio during the slideshow at the start.) Organizers explained the service had been delayed due to Covid, but […]

Distrustful of (some) digital technology, yet resentful of the power others might gain by its use, CPAC attendees were asked almost nonstop to consume “conservative” or “alt-tech” technologies. In the hours-long general sessions each day, in a ballroom with thousands of chairs, flashy, high-tech displays showed video ads between every speaker or panel—for The Right Stuff (“a dating app for the right wing”), Tusk (“The Freedom-First Web Browser developed exclusively for Conservatives”), Parler (a “free speech” clone of Twitter), FourSure (“a powerful remote control for the content you already share” so you “Don’t get hacked or canceled”), and other tech companies.

    Sometimes when you feel the weight of everything—all those space rocks grinding away senselessly, nebulae billowing, nuclear fires ejecting plasma, the oppressive silence of your own existence building on some little planet of a Sunday afternoon to the realization that buying that eggplant on a whim at the supermarket on Thursday created a […]

    A multinational corporation was investing in environmental initiatives, and I hoped to write about them. Their main project was highly technical; for background they had me email two university scientists. The scientists could not easily explain to a layman what they did, and besides, they admitted, what they were working on would not […]

    On a trip to the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis this summer, a wonderful thing happened: my younger son suddenly thought of something he would like for his birthday. My kids do not want things, usually, which makes holiday gift-giving difficult, so I was happy to hear it. We were in the […]

  A woman in a nearby town has died, only in her mid-70s, and strangers have gathered in her yard to walk through her house to see if they would like to buy her things. The house was built in 1945 and at a glance looks off-balance, taller than it is wide. It seems as […]

    How many times in my life have I worked in that particular position: squatting or kneeling, one hand holding up a heavy piece of furniture or machinery, the other hand using a screwdriver, Allen key, or crescent wrench on it delicately? It is the trick of heavy and light labor at the same […]

    I would bet that at least once every day of the week (except Monday and Tuesday), there is a young guy with a beard and wraparound shades on the back of his ball cap, or an older guy with a T-shirt that says something like, “For those I love I will do great […]

    Donald Trump’s keynote speech at the end of CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) in Dallas last Saturday ended with a scripted, dystopian litany of all he says is wrong with America under a Democratic administration, to include: Inflation, the stock market, energy costs, the Green New Deal, Afghanistan “surrender,” Russia in Ukraine […]

In the way that burlesque, roller derbies, and tattooing and other body modifications were reclaimed in the postmodern age (though not without detractors), sideshows and freak shows have tried to become something different than their earlier iterations. Many say they intend to be inspirational, empowering, and to realign conceptions about difference.

    Protestant services this morning at the Hilton Anatole marked the end of CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference ) Texas 2022, which was held in Dallas. The conference itself appeared to be meticulously planned, technologically adept, and smoothly run. Nearly everyone who spoke at the general sessions thanked Matt and Mercedes Schlapp, hosts […]

    The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, “the largest and most influential gathering of conservatives in the world,” finished its second day on Friday. There were no breakout sessions, as there were the day before; all speakers appeared for an average of no more than 10-15 minutes at the tightly-run general session […]

    The Hilton Anatole in Dallas, named for the developer’s favorite Copenhagen restaurant, was the Reagan-Bush campaign headquarters during the Republican National Convention in 1984. In 2021, and now in 2022, it was/is the site of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The conference hotel has a “Zen…and vacay” theme, according to an electronic […]

    Driving west through Missouri today, I saw a billboard for lawyer Mark McCloskey’s Missouri Senate campaign. NEVER BACK DOWN! it said, under a photo of McCloskey and his wife, Patricia, during the now-infamous incident in St. Louis where they brandished guns at a group passing their house on the way to a protest. […]

    “[A]ll I can say is that y’all can all go to hell, and I’m goin’ back to Texas,” said Nicole Reffit after the sentencing of her husband, Guy, yesterday, for his role in the January 6th insurrection. Mrs. Reffit called her husband’s sentence, the longest so far at more than seven years, “political […]

    I suppose I should have known how appealing an old truck would be to some other people by my own reaction when I saw it at the curb. Ol’ Blue, an F-150 from the mid-1990s, was sitting with a For Sale sign in its windshield when I ran into a neighborhood from the […]

    Some of my earliest memories, I realize now, are actually of time. The invisible wind making a wave that approached in the prairie grass; dappled light under the tree that changed with the incidence of the sun. The fatigue of long summer days—heat, humidity, playing with friends, water breaks. Time for this and […]

    Tradition has it that Charles II slighted Hemyock Castle because Parliament held it against his father in the English Civil War. Slighting, in the archaic sense, was to ruin an opponent’s possessions for their intended purposes. It did not mean razing every building or salting the fields until barren, and it was done […]

    My mom, who raised me alone, said when I was a kid that she would come to every game if I wanted to play Little League, but I knew how she felt about team sports, which was the same as how she felt about unrefrigerated potato salad at the picnic. Besides, we lived […]

Given the loss of the Foucek farm, which would have helped serve all these goals, a funny but familiar feeling rises—that as priorities change something worse can always happen to the landscape. Are these towns a good model for conservation in American suburbs in the age of sprawl? Or are they creating a situation that fosters more conflict and justifies more development?

    Never let it be said The Common Reader cannot glimpse the future. In June 2020 I wrote a satire that pretended a corporate dairy was “marketing and selling…milks, flavored milks, creams, sour creams, ice cream, ice-cream bars and sandwiches, and cheeses” in different ways for those with differing political beliefs, “as a way […]

    The pro-choice rally at the last clinic in Missouri to offer abortions was held Friday evening in St. Louis. Hundreds of people packed the parking lot of the Planned Parenthood building on Forest Park Avenue; dozens more lined the sidewalk and median, waving signs and calling to traffic that honked back. Missouri became […]

    I was not tuned in when Slimeheads became Orange Roughies; Patagonian Toothfish became Chilean Sea Bass; or in certain markets Whore’s Eggs reverted to Sea Urchins. But today I was there (virtually) when the problematic fish known as Asian Carp became known as Copi. At least that is what a consortium, led by […]

    The second day of hearings by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol was held yesterday. The focus of its argument was tighter than on the first day of hearings, as the committee moved from an overview of Donald Trump’s complicity in events to specific elements […]

Her strength was both poise and pose, and her independence had to be on her own terms, because no one else cared about her terms but me. She had no standing, within a few years of my birth, socially, financially, professionally, or personally. Truth is, she may have felt a kind of freedom in not working for years, not having to deal with people, puttering in her ruined house and curating her family junk.

    The first of the public hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol aired on multiple platforms tonight. It was two hours of preliminary case-building—ultimately against Donald Trump for trying to subvert the presidential election results—with testimony and taped depositions as evidence, and video […]

    Theaters of War (2022) is a new documentary that reveals deeper connections between the Pentagon, the CIA, and American film and TV productions. It is not just the Top Guns these entities have a hand in, and their participation does not begin or end with providing war machines and personnel to make movies […]

    The Babushkas of Chernobyl is a 2015 documentary produced and directed by Holly Morris and Anne Bogart, which emerged from Morris’ earlier journalism and TED Talk about elderly women living in the shadow of the destroyed Chernobyl nuclear plant. It is available on several streaming platforms. Chernobyl became a household word in 1986 […]

    National Geographic’s Becoming Cousteau (2021), directed and produced by Liz Garbus, is an interesting and timely feature-length biography of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. (The Odyssey, a 2016 film, was a biopic on his life, based on a nonfiction book.) Becoming is not a deep dive, so to speak, but it does certain things very well. […]

    Think of how frantic you would be if you discovered your child had swallowed part of a mushroom they found at the playground. Or what if you caught your cat eating a new houseplant, or your dog ran through a bed of something in the woods and was pawing its eyes? One resource […]

    Some technologies seem to be more aggressive than others in changing their times. Automatic transmissions, for instance, are ubiquitous but fairly inconsequential; they did not significantly change the experience of driving, and I can still choose to drive a stick if I really want. The rise of synthetic fabrics meant little to me […]

“Sympathy” in narrative usually means something more like “complex interest” than “pity.” The goal is (often but not always) to make characters as human as possible, within constraints of form, so audiences will find them meaningful. This requires treating characters with respect, at least to the point of trying to understand them, even if they are crooks, sadists, torturers, murderers, or Nazis. But if a narrative dramatizes very well, it risks justifying bad people or making us feel we “understand” or “identify with” them. This too is sometimes called “sympathy”—though it is more like empathy—for the devil.

    Yesterday was national Independent Bookstore Day, which the Boston Globe says was first “put on by the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association” in 2014. I did not know there was such a promotional event until it was over, but anything that helps preserve our national reserve of independent bookstores and saves us from […]

    Cooking shows are a busman’s holiday for me, given I have always done the cooking in the family. Over the decades one of my recreations has been watching Jacques, Julia, the Two Fat Ladies, Keith Floyd, and others, including Bourdain, who was rarely shown cooking but did his traveling first as a chef […]

    One of my grandfather’s first jobs was child coal miner, family lore says. My other grandfather, also born in the 1880s, would have labored on the family farm or, more likely, on land they worked as sharecroppers. My grandmothers as children and teens would have worked the crops and labored in the home, […]

    Mantas Kvedaravicius, a Lithuanian documentary filmmaker, was killed by Russians this week as he tried to leave Mariupol in southern Ukraine. He is best known for the film Mariupolis, which was nominated for prizes at international film festivals in Berlin, Hong Kong, and Stockholm; he won Best Director at the festival in Vilnius. […]

    For a time, during the early part of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, social media was inundated with videos of captured Russian soldiers being given tea by everyday Ukrainians and a chance to call their parents back home. The propagation of this compassion might have seemed at odds with the viral video of […]

    Artists can be up to many things, but I have always been drawn to those who bear witness. “Poetry begins with listening,” says poet Sean Singer. In this role the artist is a sort of Quan Am—she who listens to the world’s cries—or like the angels in Wings of Desire, who watch and […]

    Creative writing programs in universities often host visiting writers and poets for public readings, student manuscript consultations, and class visits. As an undergraduate I organized the visit of Gwendolyn Brooks (and her husband, Henry Blakely, Jr., who demanded to know what poetry I, a mere proser, was working on). As a teacher I […]

Standing Rock disappeared from mainstream media in the daily deluge of political scandals and outre behavior. But Native Americans had predicted that sparks from Oceti Sakowin’s sacred fire would be carried around the earth, and they could be seen in other Indigenous camps and movements that resisted the Bayou Bridge Pipeline in Louisiana, the TransCanada Keystone XL pipeline, and the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mt. Mauna Kea.

    Maybe you have had a cat like our Abbey—everything on her terms, selective in her affections, so distant she seemed half-wild, but firmly part of the family. We adopted her and her “brother” at the same time, when our sons were little. We found her in the PetSmart room devoted to shelter cats, […]

    Everybody and everything around us are hurtling through time together, so we often experience a relative stillness as we age, just as we stretch and yawn hurtling through space at 872,000 miles per hour. If you ever wondered why Great Uncle Gus fails to register the effect his dancing has on wedding guests, […]

    Technological innovation is tricky. Flying cars, sure, we know what to do: get a car, add wings and a propeller. But put a magnetron in a metal box and use it to hyper-excite water molecules in food? Never saw that one coming. Yesterday I was reading how a tech company hopes to store […]

    Oleg’s Choice: A Personal Look at the Conflict in Ukraine (Java Films, 2016) is an insightful profile of two young Russian men, Oleg and Max, who volunteered to fight without pay in the Donbas after conflict erupted there in 2014. It is directed by Elena Volochine, France 24’s Moscow Bureau Chief (now no […]

    It has been strange, this last week, to feel as if the fears of the early ‘80s had skipped over several decades and landed in our time to confront us. When I was a young soldier, in the Reagan-Bush era, we used to shoot at Soviet soldier-shaped outlines at the range. Back then, […]

An eyewitness account of the end of the engrossing first act of the Standing Rock movement.

So many people got involved, for so many different reasons, that protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline was (nearly) a blank template. This gave many opportunities for conflict and few firm measures of success, except oil never flowing in the pipeline.

    The bravery and devotion to duty of the small State Border Guard Service garrison on Snake [Zmiinyi] Island, an outpost of Ukrainian territorial boundaries in the Black Sea, has been much on social media. When a Russian naval vessel, said to be the cruiser Moskva, demanded their surrender in the first day of […]

    For a time, back in the Reagan-Bush era, I was a teen employee in a Hardee’s in coal country. By incompetence I had failed upward, away from the fry station and off the backline, to work the front counter, and then that most American techno-capitalist space, the drive-thru window. I was like a […]

    When you speak with someone on the street, you usually know relatively quickly when they are self-interested, when they do not have answers, when they are delusional, stalling, or wandering off topic. That is, when they are full of it. Similarly, corporate communication is mostly propaganda, noncommunication designed to force people into strict […]

  A visitor last week to a major Hollywood film production was treated to a view of the food that gets an army of extras through 12 to 16-hour work days. One hears self-referential stories and jokes in movies and on TV about “the craft table,” or “craft service,” as if it offers a bonanza […]

    Travel—and here I do not mean tourism or flight from danger—is often no escape. If anything–if it is being done well–it makes obvious how we are individual bodies at the mercy of time and the world. Your library card is a useless talisman in another city. I am traveling now for a project, […]

    When I got out of the army I spoke with a heavy southern accent I had picked up from my roommate and another friend, who were both from north Florida. A cold caller once said to me in surprise [say this in the heaviest accent you can imagine]: “Good lord, brother. Where are […]

    Driving through the piney woods of the Georgia Piedmont this week, I was sure I knew where I was going so I turned off Maps. I was wrong, and by the time I discovered my mistake I was nearly out of gas. There was nothing around. Roadside service companies do not always require […]

    When we say “dull,” it is often the result of over-familiarity or insufficient study. Those Tiger Lilies were charming yesterday, you said. What changed? Boredom is the collapse of the concrete into idealism. If my city is bustling but tiresome, then a more bustling city would be better. My yacht glows but not […]

  For Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Common Reader Editor Gerald Early interviewed Anna Malaika Tubbs on her recent book, The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation (Flatiron Books, December 2021). The book is a New York Times Bestseller and Amazon Editors’ Choice; […]

    The highs. The lows. The toast breaks. It has been a dizzying day of being a capitalist. My younger son, aware that my elder son has an interest in investment, wanted to buy him a couple of shares of Ford for Christmas. When the trade went through, the stock was a bit more […]

    The Boys in Red Hats (2021) is about the 2019 encounter between field-tripping students from an all-boys Catholic school and a small Native American group on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The film is worth a watch, not the least because it is a mess of confused sympathies. Director Jonathan Schroder explains […]

    Another swing around the sun, so I will try again to define what I have tried before: Let’s say you have good health and time. A clean little space, cool in the summer and warm in the winter, a bed that does not hurt your back, a fridge with nutritious food. You are […]

Military deep-sea divers like to play the world’s fools, even though most are supremely competent and a little piratical. They know what their real work is and find ways to play between bouts of it. This is not “blowing off steam.” It is one answer to the problem of being in the sea and to that of being immersed in any purpose—medicine, management, even writing.

    Didion has died. She was the last of American peers (save Gay Talese, who is 89) dubbed New Journalists, and the only woman widely acknowledged to be in the group. The label meant, at least in part, to have become popular as a writer in the 1960s, to have been defined by that […]

    I had never registered that there are film festivals dedicated to poetry and filmmaking until a friend told me recently about a new one, called the International Poetry Film Festival. International Poetry Film Festival judges are currently considering 41 short films, from several countries, in categories such as Narrative, Animated, Documentary, and Experimental. […]

    We have lived on the Gulf and watched hurricanes organize off the swell of West Africa, grind their way across the expanse of the sea, thread their way through and over the islands, and turn north on the current to hit our coast. We have lived on the Atlantic and experienced small hurricanes […]

    A fascinating 2019 documentary called State Funeral is available now on MUBI, but be forewarned: the film literally moves at the speed of a dirge, as it shows the public funeral of Joseph Stalin, who died March 5, 1953. The footage of grief-stricken crowds used by director Sergei Loznitsa came from “tens of […]

    A few months ago I asked the 101st Airborne, the Screaming Eagles, if I could ride around with their Combat Aviation Brigade (CAB) for a week, in order to write about the helicopters and a historical anniversary for the Division. The 101st is an Air Assault division now (helicopters used for combat troop […]

    The new documentary Julia works to explain why Julia Child still matters culturally, both as the first TV-chef icon and as a feminist who paved the way in two sexist fields: professional cooking and media. The film is directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West, who were nominated for an Academy Award in […]

    I was in high school when Star Trek: The Motion Picture premiered. It was the first Star Trek film, and the first fix for fans since the TV show had ended a decade before. I was never much of a fan but stood in line with everyone else on opening night, and I […]

    IFC Films has released a new documentary on Kurt Vonnegut, co-directed by Robert Weide, who in the process of filming Vonnegut over decades created a close relationship with the writer. The film traces this connection, even as it shows Weide’s failure to make his original conception of the documentary—for 40 years. Weide has […]

Balzac, who married only late in life, is unclear whether a husband or a wife would need to be an almost-genius to create a good husband. Maybe by genius he meant the attendant spirit of a couple working together to make something, which after all is a chief value in marriage.

    As it rounded a corner in a parking lot at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, the Dymaxion Car made a nostalgic sound, throaty and hardworking. Its engine, a 1933 Ford Flathead V-8, has been described as one of the 10 best engines of the last century and was used for both cars and trucks, […]

    All kids are tuned to difference, since it means survival. But when you grow up poor you become acutely aware that some people have the means to change things, even in small ways, but do not. Discouraged by the enormity of the problem, they laugh too much or develop blank or busy looks. […]

    What do I get for predicting that James Bond would still be looking over his shoulder in retirement, and despite his heroic adventures would feel only fatigue and purposelessness? None of that was hard, but what about my prediction that he would be “bombing-around in a vintage Land Rover, then cleaning it to […]

    I am not in the habit of writing paeans to war machines, but the prototype of the UH-1 Huey helicopter flew for the first time 65 years ago this month, and it was a special machine, in war and peace, that far outlasted its maker. Lawrence Bell was born in 1894, nine years […]

    The Oath Keepers, a militia group, is (still) in the news, as the Department of Justice and the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol continue their work on the scope and causes of that day’s events. “Members of the group brought rifles to the Washington […]

    Every few years the Mississippi at St. Louis drops enough to reveal the wreck of a WWII minesweeper, the USS Inaugural, lying in a few feet of water, next to the Missouri shore. How it came to be there is a strange story, well worth reading. The River is relatively low now, so […]

    Of course a city garbage truck—big, dangerous, smelly—was the big hit at the local Touch a Truck event today, and both kids and parents enthused over it. My younger son had volunteered to help staff the event, and it was one of our first cold mornings of the fall in St. Louis. When […]

  “How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning?” —WG Sebald, After Nature   I know someone who used to say, at key life-moments: I’m going to just [do this one thing], and we’ll see what happens. If you looked downstream from that first step, it always proved to have […]

    Ms. Charlotte Davis wanted to show me everything. I was standing on the porch of the log cabin next to the museum, and when I turned she had appeared on the steps, an older local lady with tight white hair, asking why I had decided to visit. I had the odd feeling she […]

    A would-be participant in the Houston Women’s March for reproductive and voting rights stood in a line of three dozen people waiting to pay to park on Saturday morning, in a lot next to Minute Maid Park and a Catholic women’s prep school. She was dressed as a handmaid, from the TV adaptation […]

The story of Delyte Morris and the Southern Illinois University he created is what Robert A. Harper calls “a story of unlikely success and a tragic end.” It does read like an American tragedy, somehow, based in a rustic start, ambition, ingenuity, and the fallibility of good intentions.

The story of Delyte Morris and the Southern Illinois University he created is what Robert A. Harper calls “a story of unlikely success and a tragic end.” It does read like an American tragedy, somehow, based in a rustic start, ambition, ingenuity, and the fallibility of good intentions.

  I live with a blessed patch of pines between me and the main road, so I do not think about traffic much until the screaming sirens fly past, quite close, and I have to wait to see if there is a problem in my neighborhood—fire, medical emergency—as they take the long way around. So […]

    Maybe you too have the 2005 edition of The Elements of Style, by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, illustrated by Maira Kalman. It is one of those books that seems to rise to the surface of piles of books and present its slim, red, hardcover binding when it knows it is needed. […]

  I have been talking a long time, I realized, about finding the perfect place to live one day. Southern Illinois was my first biome, and I still know it intimately, but summers can be miserably humid and hot. Before every major thunderstorm, people in the St. Louis area keep saying this will be the […]

    When 9-11 happened I was teaching at the University of Illinois. My wife was six weeks pregnant with our first son. We were getting ready for work but stopped to watch the Towers fall on TV, as most of the rest of the world did, and wondered what it all meant. You probably […]

    Start with small seats on the aircraft, smaller all the time, it seems, and the expectation that flights will be full, and no room in the overhead bins, so your bag goes under the seat in front of you, and your feet get pinned in place, knees bent tighter than 90 degrees for […]

    As I write this, the World Superyacht Awards are wrapping up here, in the Monte-Carlo Sporting, the big venue for society fundraising in Monaco. Guests are moving slowly from the champagne reception into the festive Salles des Etoiles, where they will have dinner, and soon Neptune awards will be handed out to boat […]

    We have an old bottle of Macallan whisky given to us by my in-laws, who were Scottish immigrants in the 1950s. They told us that a family friend was a foreman at the Macallan distillery, and he gifted them the bottle on the eve of the Japanese buying the distillery, because everything was […]

WWII’s most famous correspondent, a combat nurse, and the need to remember our sacrifice.

She had likely been in more countries and combat zones than WWII correspondent Ernie Pyle and had helped save many lives, maybe even someone in your family. But few remember her from life, the records are mostly lost, and I know of no markers.

    “Hot damn, mummies!” I heard someone say at the St. Louis Science Center, which is currently hosting the exhibit Mummies of the World. Who is not drawn to gaze on a mummy, even at $19.95 a ticket? Usually I think of mummies as “ceremonially preserved,” but this exhibit takes the more accurate, broader […]

    Comedian-musician Bo Burnham has a song in his most recent Netflix special, Inside, that admits he is “problematic.” In making a joke of something true, he either faces it or is trying to get ahead of criticism (or both), depending on the viewing. Burnham has been performing online since he was 16 years […]

    The Illinois State Fair was canceled in 2020, for the pandemic, and for years before that I was living elsewhere. As we walked across the Fairgrounds yesterday to meet the rest of our family, my younger son asked if I knew where I was going. Of course I did. When I was a […]

    Humans desire a “home,” distinguished from “a house” or other dwelling by emotional attachment. Like the house, a home might have walls, a toilet, running water, a bed, the means to keep and cook food, some basic privacy, and storage for necessary or symbolic possessions. Ease, restfulness, comfort, and visual attractiveness are preferred. […]

  Remember when Michael Jackson bought publishing rights to songs by The Beatles, Springsteen, Elvis, the Stones, and others? He did so, famously, after Paul McCartney, collaborator and once-friend, told him it was a good investment. Then Macca spent 35 years trying to get the rights back to some 250 Beatles songs. Surprisingly, anyone can […]

  My friend Larry was complaining that his flight to Paris was several hours longer, now that he lived in Los Angeles instead of Chicago. “That means I have to watch three or four more movies in-flight,” he said. He is an actor. I had just driven 13 hours from Louisiana, dropped my car in […]

Lake Charles, Louisiana, is a particularly sensitive canary in the coal mine of global warming. Not only is southwest Louisiana low-lying in the age of sea-rise; the land is also subsiding faster than just about anywhere on earth, and water courses through everything.

    First, you best get on it, if you hope to drive that road. A lot of the beauty, charm, and squalor remains, but it has changed in the nine years I have been driving it. The changes to date have been mere tinkering in comparison to what is coming. Until recently, it was […]

  I have written before about preparing book manuscripts for publication. But not only does each time feel different; assembling my own collections feels different from finishing single-arc books, and editing others’ books feels different yet again. A few weeks have passed since I finished writing, editing, and organizing the manuscript for my new essay […]

    A moving box (SMALL / PEQUEÑA), taped shut and cut open several times, is labeled with a Sharpie: LIBRARY / KNICKKNACKS / & Watches / & Dive Challenge Coins. Inside are journals, books, and a little wicker basket holding money from several countries, the first pen I carried vocationally, and an acrylic keychain […]

  A yellowed postcard was found recently on page four of an old edition of Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris, the top of which begins, as a continuation of the previous page, “Fools. On that day there was to be an exhibition of fireworks in the Place de Grève, a May-tree planted at the […]

    Newt is an orange tabby that hangs out on the extensive bike trails in St. Louis’ Metro East. Chances are, if you are walking, running, or cycling in Newt’s territory and see a group stopped ahead, they are petting and making a fuss over him. If the humans are newbs they might be […]

  One of the few syntheses available to us is that it is hard to know what we are until we are mostly formed. Others may spot aspects of us at a glance, the way civilians once identified warplanes by their silhouettes, but they are all at different angles and have varying amounts of light, […]

In Louisiana’s future, the EPA says, there will be “retreating shores,” stronger and more frequent hurricanes, more flooding, more heat than ever, and reduced crop and fishery yields. And as disasters linked to climate change increase in scale and number, we can all expect to pay for them, with interrupted commerce and supply lines, higher insurance rates, and more federal aid for recoveries like this one.

In Louisiana’s future, the EPA says, there will be “retreating shores,” stronger and more frequent hurricanes, more flooding, more heat than ever, and reduced crop and fishery yields. And as disasters linked to climate change increase in scale and number, we can all expect to pay for them, with interrupted commerce and supply lines, higher insurance rates, and more federal aid for recoveries like this one.

    My sons and I were resting while it rained. I had asked them to help me demo a damaged deck, and while I ran the saw, they carried joists and deck lumber to the curb. We had only worked a couple of hours but were dirty and soaked with sweat and rain. It […]

    Heat, like any form of power, can be beneficial or disastrous. The sun’s heat makes life possible, but 2020’s temperatures tied for the hottest year on record, which “suggests a swift step up the climate escalator,” says the Post. “And it implies that a momentous new temperature record—breaching the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius […]

    We have a one-and-done attitude in our house with Netflix. We tend not to binge; we just want something to relax with for half an hour or so after dinner before going on with the night. That can be a challenge, both for brevity and for quality. Many of the nonfiction series on […]

Wealth and technology have allowed development in regions of the country without adequate water, but when wealth and technology fail to sustain, we will be forced to pay greater attention.

    “Welcome to whatever this is,” comedian Bo Burnham says, a few minutes into his new Netflix special. “It’s not gonna be a normal special, because there’s no audience and there’s no crew. It’s just me and my camera, and you and your screen, the way that Our Lord intended.” Burnham, who is only […]

    I received a link last week to a 60-page PDF booklet called “Wear Good Shoes: Advice from Magnum Photographers.” It is worth a look. Magnum is the photographers cooperative founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour. Their identity as a group was meant to be the […]

    I had a piece to write, about the Mississippi. Flat shining basins, filled with river water made to slow its roll, lay on the other shore. I chose to write it because that stretch of river made me uneasy. Facing it, you know. I would write my way forward into whatever my deal […]

    “Here we are in Lake Charles, feeling like we are living out the book of Job in the Bible,” a Facebook friend wrote this week. “God has smitten us again.” “Who else is tired of Survivor Lake Charles?” someone else wrote. After a year with two hurricanes (Laura, August 2020, and Delta, October […]

  There often has been a sense of respite in quarantine for some of us lucky enough to have remote jobs and children who get along in tight quarters. The period leading to Covid was rough, too, after all, and my self-assignments to see aspects of it sometimes seemed more like self-punishment. “It’s not like […]

    A “votercade” was held in St. Louis on Saturday, in support of the National John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Action Day. The national event was to “to demand preservation and expansion of voting rights,” by “mobilizing to pass the For the People Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, DC Statehood and […]

    Followers of the prosperity gospel worship the power of positive thinking—above all, the puritan faith that they are preordained for prosperity—and are comically impious as a result. “Expect great things and great things will come,” said Norman Vincent Peale, friend and counselor to Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Trump. But just as the cynic is, […]

    When I was training to be a military diver, the school’s cadre often ran us out to the beach to run in formation through the loose sand of the dunes, because it was said to be good for our wind and leg strength. It was certainly tiring, and the PT would often go […]

Jenny Erpenbeck, born in East Berlin, is an award-winning German novelist, short story writer, playwright, and opera director. Not a Novel is her first full-sized nonfiction collection, translated in 2020 by Kurt Beals, a professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis.

  The Union Miners’ Cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois, was quiet on a recent Thursday afternoon. It sits a quarter-mile south of one of the remaining stretches of old Route 66, in a town of two thousand. The cemetery is filled with German, Italian, and Eastern European names of those drawn to work the extensive […]

    Say a universal income was instituted, or you won the lottery, or were lucky enough to find a job that paid you to do what you enjoyed. What would you do if all your basic financial needs were met? My mom used to say, “If I had all the money in the world….” […]

    A new report from Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs warns of dangers from Artificial Intelligence (AI) unlike those from androids in dystopian science-fiction movies. This AI, the report’s author, Bruce Schneier, explains, is disembodied, specific to certain tasks, unpredictable, and probably already with us. Bruce Schneier has published 14 books, […]

    When Ulysses S. Grant arrived in St. Louis in September 1843, he was twenty-one years old, weighed 117 pounds, and had a bad cough. Back home in Bethel, Ohio, a barefoot stableman had dressed up like Grant and paraded down the street, apparently drunk, to mock his new second lieutenant’s uniform. On the […]

I have been reading with interest the new book Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty (Oxford UP), by Mark Robert Rank, Lawrence M. Eppard, and Heather E. Bullock. (Rank is a professor in the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis.) As the authors say, “Few topics […]

    When my first collection of essays was coming out a few years ago, a friend asked me to write down what I had learned about the process of assembling and editing the book, which was different from writing a novel or even another kind of nonfiction book. I wrote then, “Everything is fragments. […]

Freak Power: The Ballot or the Bomb is a brief portrait of a brilliant young writer, frustrated with his local and national governments, applying his beliefs to the practice of grassroots politics instead of keeping to the commentariat. For any young writers who wish to “write like Hunter S. Thompson,” or fans who love the Johnny Depp portrayal, the documentary will be instructive.

    Something important has happened in the art world: the possibility of exclusive ownership of digital art, by blockchain technology. As with Bitcoin, a digital “certificate of authenticity” can be embedded in digital art, making it unique and therefore more collectible. The application of the existing technology to artwork has suddenly caught on, with […]

    The question in yesterday’s Zoom event hosted by the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, in St. Louis, was how artist residencies, art institutions, universities, and activist organizations might work together for social justice. How do you measure collaborative success in such projects? One answer: policy change. The host, Geoff Ward, is Professor of African and […]

  A stampede of camels groan in the red dust; a dog barks as it streaks past a yurt, in pursuit. This is the opening of Tulpan (2008), a Kazakh narrative film streaming now as part of Filmatique’s Foreign Language Oscar Submissions curation. The film won many awards internationally, including the Prix Un Certain Regardat […]

    The documentary The Booksellers was set to release theatrically in 2020, but the pandemic hit, and it made its way to Amazon Prime. The film is a group portrait of lovesickness—the ecstasy, labor, and sometimes disappointment of the spurned, of book dealers and collectors. “If you’re a collector you’re a sick, obsessive, compulsive […]

My baldness is not meant to signify anything, but it does not mean nothing, even to me.

One of the literary figures whose association with St. Louis has been mostly forgotten is Theodore Dreiser, author of the novels Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. Dreiser lived and worked in St. Louis for 16 formative months, from November 1892 to March 1894. He was only 21 when he arrived, and other than five […]

    The website Find A Grave was started in 1995 by a man named Jim Tipton, as an amateur tribute site for celebrity graves. It became a commercial site in 1998 and began posting photos, submitted by other people, of non-celebrity graves. Genealogists and families who were unable to visit relatives’ gravesites loved it. […]

  The prosecution rested today, in the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, five to six hours ahead of schedule. The Senate is adjourned until noon Eastern, Friday, when Trump’s lawyers will mount a defense, on the fourth day of the trial. Over the three days so far, nine House Democrats chosen by Speaker Pelosi […]

  The genuine emotion on the first day of the impeachment trial, today, came from US Representative Jamie Raskin, of Maryland’s 8th District, who is the lead manager for the second impeachment of Donald Trump. Raskin’s opening statement was calm, succinct, and plainly-worded. “Because I’ve been a professor of constitutional law for three decades, I […]

  When I was a kid, in the Midwest, spinach was obviously good for you because it came hygienically frozen in blocks straight from the factory and was bitter as sin in the pot. Who would ever have eaten that boiled mush if it did not provide the iron we were all supposedly lacking? (Braunschweiger, […]

      The problems for writers of historical fiction may be little different from those of anyone using “true events” as the basis of their stories. Sources may be more distant, but the real issue remains: which drama, among the welter of life, historical accounts, and potential metaphors will be portrayed? The Dig, a […]

My sons are everything to me, and I appreciate any remaining chances to share in their understandings. Like many things in American life now, this also is a tug between the conservative (preserving their safety, and our money, time, and effort) and the liberal (being open to new views and experiences).

    Inaugural Day was bright and cold, with 200,000 small flags replacing an audience on the Mall, and the capital an occupation zone. The number of deaths from Covid passed 400,000, more than our WWII dead, as the sitting President winged away. None of it felt normal or right, but many watched in tears, […]

    There are online classes or sessions of all kinds these days, such as The Great Courses (“Learn at your own pace with no schedule, while exercising, commuting, or just relaxing. Just you and the world’s greatest professors!”); TED Talks (“free knowledge from the world’s most inspired thinkers”); and the ones in this list […]

  As law enforcement and amateur Internet sleuths continue to identify those who stormed Congress on Wednesday, some are poring over video of a “disciplined” group in tactical gear, who walk single-file, hand on the person in front of them, up the east Capitol steps through the disordered mob. Several members of the group have […]

Because they could. And because there was precedent. No, not the British, who burned the US Capitol Building along with most of official Washington, DC, in 1814. This comparison is pertinent mostly only because yesterday’s event was “the first time a malicious group has breached the U.S. Capitol since the British in August 1814.” But […]

    Men he knew liked to call and say they were rolling out. They were headed out now, they explained, when it did not need to be explained, that they were gonna be rolling through on my way to…. Going to take a slow drive, see what they could see. When he was younger […]

    When we have lived where snow is possible at Christmas, we have always felt a little sorry for those in warmer climates. I remember a deep-snow winter in my Southern Illinois childhood that broke all records, and every Christmas since, the kid that I was emerges from the playroom in my brain to […]

    It is 72 degrees and raining again in Lake Charles. It has been raining off and on for days. There is an ongoing mosquito infestation, despite two US Air Force C-130s bombing the city with insecticide. Lake Charles, Louisiana, a city of 78,000 on the Gulf Coast, was hit directly by two hurricanes […]

Never pin your financial hopes on a legume. Ham and beans is really about making use of what one already has at hand, driving one’s own good luck by not wasting opportunities, such as a few handfuls of hard beans and the inedible shank of a pig left over from Christmas dinner.

    The Atlantic’s first documentary, White Noise, is directed by Daniel Lombroso, who also did the camera work. It was Lombroso who captured the images in 2016 of white nationalist Richard Spencer (“a kind of professional racist in khakis,” says the SPLC) chanting “Hail, Trump!” at an event, and members of the audience giving […]

    Judith Helfand’s newest film, Love and Stuff, puts the past in conversation with the present, and the results are moving. Helfand is known for socially-engaged films such as Blue Vinyl, an Emmy-nominated documentary about health risks from the PVC industry, and Cooked: Survival by Zip Code (reviewed previously, here). This film is more […]

  A new documentary shows some of what those in Wuhan, China, faced in the early days of the pandemic. 76 Days , funded in part by the Sundance Institute and the Ford Foundation, is being distributed by MTV Documentary Films. It will be released tomorrow in “50 virtual cinemas,” such as Film Forum in […]

Spalding Gray’s images of immersion, of sharks in a swimming pool, of drowning fears, of being a child rocked to sleep by the sea, of being a “pumpkin-headed perceiver” among waves hiding the shore, seem all too meaningful now.

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

    As I wrote in September, my friend Charlie bought my kids and me a ticket for a Willy Wonka-ish contest. Promoter and businessman David Klein, who likes to be called The Candyman, is giving away a candy factory in Florida, and the winner will come from two rounds of competitions. The first round, […]

  The film Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin was shown at Tribeca and Telluride, and on the BBC, in 2019, but it is just now available in the US, on several platforms. The film is a documentary on the writer, who died in 1989, by his friend Werner Herzog. “A few times in […]

Imagine if some of us were in our cups—let’s say we had a day off and a backyard big enough to social-distance—and the topic turned to military service. I guarantee that long before we reached the dregs, veritas would come spilling out: We have very different ideas on what “service” means. Some see it as necessary […]

Harry Weber specializes in sports and historical figures, and there is a good chance you have seen his work at a stadium or public site. His 150 installations include Bobby Orr, Bill Bradley, Payne Stewart, Lou Brock, Chuck Berry, Daniel Boone, Dred and Harriet Scott, Lewis and Clark, and St. Francis of Assisi.

Misery may love company, but it adores relief. Hope of relief is what the miserable live for. A hot meal for troops in the field is not strictly necessary, any more than hot showers. Only calories count, and packaged cold rations provide them. But a hot breakfast is a psychological boost, a reminder of how […]

    It has been a week. Anything else anybody wants to announce? We could all use a break. My sons and I were out and about during election week, to bear witness to the historically significant, should it occur. But things in the Midwest have been surprisingly quiet, a good problem for a writer […]

    I can remember when a critic went coocoo-bananas that Sean Connery had supposedly started playing father/mentor roles. This was after the release of 1986’s Highlander, in which he played a “Spaniard” from ancient Egypt who trains the protagonist to fight evil; offers the wisdom of the millennia he has lived; and is killed […]

When I was a kid, Sinclair Oil Company used to hand out Apatosaurus toys and soap-on-a-rope as incentives, since their logo was “Dino” the dinosaur. Word on the street with the banana-seat bunch was that oil came from dead dinosaurs. Oil began, of course, as algae and plankton mixed with the mud of ancient seas. […]

Because it is about our nation as much as it is about one city, and because Johnson frames it as “the two-hundred-year history of removal, racism, and resistance that flowed through the two minutes of confrontation on August 9, 2014”—the killing of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, which touched off Black Lives Matter—the book is for all of us and for now.

    The Borat sequel, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, was released last night on Amazon Prime, a few hours earlier than announced, to coincide with the Presidential debate. The moviefilm is not as edgy or tightly-constructed as other Sacha Baron Cohen […]

    I could not relax, walking the bike path today, among people blaring country music, the guy shouting at heaven, large unleashed dogs thinking heroic thoughts, and clouds of biting gnats in the sun. But what spiked my irritation was the group of five middle-aged guys on expensive road bikes, wearing aerodynamic helmets and […]

One of my old friend’s names is a synonym for king. I have known him since we were maybe eight, when his mother placed him in my mom’s Cub Scout den. We were all rascals, but he and I were fatherless and poor. Due to the authority of his size, and what would turn out […]

Scholar Mark Edmundson says, “[Harold] Bloom once told a seminar I was in that he used to ask people he’d just met what was the worst thing that ever happened to them. Cuts to the chase, doesn’t it? I’m more inclined to ask about the best.” Why can’t we have both? That is, the worst […]

  The new documentary Oliver Sacks: His Own Life is the first whole-life film biography of the neurologist famous for some sixteen books, including Awakenings (also a film with Robin Williams, as Sacks), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and An Anthropologist on Mars. Sacks died from a recurrence of cancer, at […]

      An old friend (his name, coincidentally, Charlie) bought my kids and me a present recently: A chance to find a golden tag and then to win a candy factory. Fans of the Willy Wonka movies and books know the basic plot, but it has been updated for real life. In this version, […]

  If you have ever been truly poor (or a soldier or mountain man), you understand that having potable water, edible food, immediate physical safety, lifegiving medicine, heat in the winter, and basic hygiene of body/clothes/housing (including an absence of vermin), are what matter. There is, in fact, a relief in knowing what the basics […]

    Last week on Facebook I reposted something from celebrity chef Jacques Pépin, who is pictured in front of a wall covered in pots and pans. The headline of his post reads, “Here are some of my pans.” On the anniversary of 9-11, with a record number of named storms in the Atlantic, the […]

    The Princess Bride, you will remember, is about some really bad guys being defeated by true love and by some charming guys who are pretty bad too. (“You seem like a decent fellow. I hate to kill you,” says the mercenary to the pirate who kills all prisoners.) In a live table read […]

    The title essay of Tatyana Tolstaya’s Pushkin’s Children: Writings on Russia and Russians is an account of the changes in feeling toward Russian writers, within Russia, over time. The essay questions the writer’s role, as artist and as citizen, and the role of words as cause, effect, or neither. Tolstaya points out that […]

    The release of the new James Bond film was delayed three times but is scheduled for November 20th. Fans in my household who saw the trailer are worried it will waste the final appearance of Daniel Craig, whom they believe is better in the role than Sean Connery, the Bond icon. No Time […]

    Donnie was sitting on his porch when we passed. It had been three days since the hurricane. His house was missing half its shingles, and the city had no power or water. Next door, workmen were ripping up the damaged rubber roof of a business, in order to put down plastic tarps that […]

The eye of Hurricane Laura passed over Lake Charles, Louisiana, in the early morning hours last Thursday. Friday night the storm was in Memphis, where blood-red lightning illuminated the clouds. Airliners descended over the outlet mall, landing lights ablaze, like archangels in the thunderheads, and fog swirled from the hollows. It was a surreal reminder […]

    Read more by John Griswold here.

Maybe it was being mistaken for that other young man that fixed the incident in my mind for 35 years. Maybe it was the helplessness of an army’s search at sea, on rivers, and in the jungle. Maybe I am predisposed to worry over everything turning away in time, calmly.

In a time of instant expectation, a hurricane is a lesson in waiting. I grew up in the Midwest, where tornadoes blossom quickly, and their effects are quickly known. A hurricane grinds its way from Africa, many times, its path uncertain. Even after forecast models converge, and its landfall spot is known more surely, several […]

    Dave “Tuffy” Cabusora has sold pop art online for ten years—full-time since 2017. He was afraid he might be driven out of business due to the pandemic and rising unemployment, but oddly enough, sales are up more than 100 percent this year over last. Now he has other concerns. Tuffy has mailed, on […]

  The National Center for Education Statistics says there will be about 16.5 million students taking classes at undergraduate institutions this fall, which is down by six percent from a decade ago. Still, that is some four million freshmen, and by my calculation most of them were trying to move in to the dorms at […]

Recent daytrips with my sons made me recognize a category of historical monument I had not considered much: the overenthusiastic mea culpa. The first was in my hometown of Herrin, Illinois. A stone recently erected in the cemetery marks the graves of “scab” workers murdered in 1922, during a mine strike.   The second was […]

“At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her […]

  We were driving to visit my hometown, and my elder son wanted to know if I thought that where I grew up was The South. I did not think so when I was kid. Southern Illinois was still the Land of Lincoln, even if we had to drive a little north for the Boy […]

    When my kids were younger we loved to snuggle up before bedtime and watch funny things together on the internet, such as “Dad’s Life,” an endearing music video of stereotypical fathers’ concerns (“I’ve got dozens of dollars…”). It is well-written, acted, shot, and edited. The video went viral. There was a follow-up, about […]

Inside Portland Place was the house made of stone, the building material of kings. Inside the house, the castle, the fortress, were Mark and Patty, heroes of an imagined apocalypse, soft centers in a crunchy shell. Looking out of their own skins.

      New York Times reporters Catrin Einhorn and Leslye Davis directed and produced the new documentary Father Soldier Son, a ten-year project that has landed this month on Netflix. One measure of how good it is, is how bad it hurts. The documentary follows the Eisch family. Brian is a young single father—his […]

      My son and I were looking up facts about WWII’s Pacific Theater, because we had been talking about my father’s service there. It is always a shock to re-encounter the scale of that war, especially the loss of lives, materiel, vehicles, vessels, labor, and natural resources. If you have ever been on […]

  Inside Higher Ed and Hanover Research have released a new survey about COVID-19 concerns on campuses. Respondents were 97 presidents or chancellors at private (about 70%) and public universities, as well as some two-year public institutions. The June 2020 survey is compared with ones in March and April. Unsurprisingly, 96% of those who replied […]

    My friend Larry is an either-or guy. He buys only ground beef or filet mignon. He is a former middle-manager turned entrepreneur and actor, who thinks about what he wants, makes multi-year plans, and methodically works for them. He is doing well. We have known each other for twenty-five years and speak daily […]

    Ricky Gervais has made six or seven series for television, depending on how you count them, including The [BBC] Office, Extras, Derek, and Life’s Too Short. His most recent is After Life, for Netflix, with one season (six episodes) in 2019, one season (six episodes) in 2020, and a third now contracted for […]

    Higher education in the United States is a big ship, with a well-established route and trade. I was a paying passenger, for the usual time, then served as a line officer for two decades. One day, in some backwater in the Horse Latitudes, I jumped ship to live among the pirates. The lack […]

    Director Werner Herzog’s latest feature film is now available, which always gives me cause for relief and surprise. In a world of Netflix fast-food, a Herzog film is a bowl of Bavarian leberknödelsuppe—something interesting and nourishing, with a complicated whiff of blood-rich organs. Herzog, now in late career with some 70 long and […]

    The character Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation is likable because we understand he is better than the sum of the parts he wants to present to the world. Actor Nick Offerman uses his Ron Swanson persona a little in the new CuriosityStream series The History of Home, but the show rarely rises […]

  The documentary series Monty Python: Almost the Truth (Lawyer’s Cut) is available on Netflix. Originally airing on BBC and the Independent Film Channel, in 2009, it is just six episodes, a total of 360 minutes, with interviews and clips of the troupe’s work. For Python fans and those interested in show business and the […]

The plan was to go back to Saigon for a second tour, but we never did due to the war, the subsequent embargo, and the dissolution of my family. My mother kept the beauty of Vietnam and its people vivid before my eyes, like a sandalwood-scented dream.

    Netflix, which uses the odd tagline “Netflix is a joke,” released Dave Chappelle’s new standup special yesterday on YouTube. As I have written before, standup as an art continues to become something other than jokes, and Chappelle, who won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2019, is at the forefront of […]

Grocery shoppers in St. Louis, Missouri, have begun making their choices, this Dairy Freedom Week, for the kind of milk they like best. Red Team Milk and Blue Team Milk appeared, over the weekend, in separate refrigerated cases in six of the largest supermarkets in the region. The milk itself is neither red nor blue; […]

    The 2017 documentary The Blood Is at the Doorstep is getting new attention during the George Floyd protests, and for a brief time is available on YouTube for free. Blood is directed and produced by Erik Ljung, a filmmaker and Director of Photography who has produced content and short documentaries for the New […]

  The George Floyd protests spread west across coastal Louisiana yesterday, from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and Lake Charles, 30 miles from Texas. The Lake Charles rally, sponsored by the Black Heritage Festival of Louisiana and Black Lives Matter, was held at the busy intersection of Broad and Enterprise streets, just east of […]

  Below St. Louis, the face masks disappeared. The sign on the door of the gas station near the St. Francois Mountains said, Please don’t come in here if you have a fever or bad cough. If you cough inside, please do it into your elbow. The second place we stopped, in Arkansas, had locked […]

We hurtle through the vacuum of space in a miraculous terrarium that supports life. It is the only one we know of. Caring for its water, soil, air, flora, and fauna seems like a good idea. But priorities get complicated, and you might be surprised at what people think of yours.

Formats of food shows are pretty set these days. There are the competitions, brutal or kind. The ones that make food an oddity, a fetish, or glutton’s challenge. The chemistry-for-better-brining sort, often combined with The Traditionalists, who know these things by classical training and mastery. (I binge-watched the America’s Test Kitchen crew, Julia Child, and […]

  My elder son tells me he wants adventure. Something memorable. Historic. Being born in the privateer age would have been nice. He worries there are no adventures left. I tell both my sons to notice what is going on and to remember. It is a historic age, of scientific discoveries, national division, political extremes, […]

  The new documentary Becoming, released May 6, is the second film from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, which signed with Netflix in 2018. Their first film (see my review here) was American Factory, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature last year. American Factory’s power came from showing the culture […]

In keeping with my habit of wondering about people I never see or talk to (and may not know at all), I decided to see how some of them are doing in the crisis.       In June of last year I met Rob Connoley, owner of Bulrush STL, a new restaurant in the […]

In keeping with my habit of wondering about people I never see or talk to (and may not know at all), I decided to see how some of them are doing in the crisis.       LaDonna Tamakawastewin Allard is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and its former historical preservation […]

Nicholas Vreeland is what passes for American royalty. He is the grandson of Diana Vreeland, the famous Editor-in-Chief of Vogue, and related to George Washington and Francis Scott Key. His father, “Freck,” was a longtime CIA officer and diplomat, and Nicky, as his family calls him, was born in Switzerland and grew up in Morocco, […]

If the Fleeting World is but a long dream, It does not matter whether one is young or old. But ever since the day that my friend left my side And has lived an exile in the City of Chiang-ling, There is one wish I cannot quite destroy: That from time to time we may […]

  I have been thinking about relative dangers, recently, since everything now seems like a calculus of risk. I also want to be able to give my children perspective, as their isolation continues, a graduation has been canceled, and their futures teeter. Those who have been shocked at the sudden humbling of our economy and […]

Because my overseas tour in the army was in the Republic of Panama, I was pleased to find a book, after I got home, called The Isthmus of Panama, and What I Saw There (1852), by Chauncey D. Griswold (no known relation). Chauncey Griswold was a surgeon for the Panama Railroad Company, which broke ground […]

The Herrin Massacre included the humiliation, wounding, and murder, by gun, rope, and knife, of unarmed men. Like the actions of any mob, it was irrational and grotesque, and there can be no defense of it. But there are better and lesser ways of telling stories. I have come to think of the massacre as an American tragedy, in which two old but opposed visions of our country were the seeds of conflict that may yet be our downfall.

Two-and-a-half hours north of St. Louis, in Quincy, Illinois, there is a private air force bigger than half the world’s combat air forces. In size, it ranks somewhere between South Africa’s and Mexico’s, and is growing (and hiring). The US military welcomes its existence. Don Kirlin owns Air USA, “the leader in military combat readiness […]

With hoarding evident from empty shelves, and fears of food insecurity in the news, people are naturally thinking of previous, widespread shortages, as in the Depression and during WWII. One recent Internet meme says, “Ya’ll are about to learn why your grandma hoarded frozen butter and washed her aluminum foil.” A video made in earnest […]

Even amidst the pandemic, historic unemployment, and the near-halt of our lives, many have worries about what will happen when isolation eases. Like the rumble of an avalanche yet to be seen, there are plenty of signs that economic problems are snowballing to hit later. What will happen after a third of Americans do not […]

As Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson has pointed out, the sudden eruption of problems in Wisconsin elections this week has national importance, since it serves as warning for what could happen on the third of November. As she puts it, “It’s hard to imagine that the election of a state judge in Wisconsin matters […]

Karl was from Springsteenland. Sammy had left the island of Puerto Rico for the first time. Moses came from the part of New York that is nearly Canada. I was from Midwest coal country. We met at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, cold-war warriors not turned 20. We were Americans in a time when America needed a […]

As we have seen, hoarding causes things to disappear from supermarket shelves. We also know it is illogical, since there is neither increased need for some of those items, nor a production shortage of them. (The first and most obvious example was toilet paper.) I shop only every 10 days or so and am surprised […]

An old friend, poet Les Kay, said on Facebook today what many of us have been thinking: “Couldn’t get to sleep last night for some reason. Woke up with cough and sweating. No big deal in normal times. Easily explained as allergies and a bad dream in normal times. That’s precisely what it was, I’m […]

Factory workers, grocery workers, delivery drivers, first responders and medical-facility personnel, garbage workers, gas-station employees, pharmacy staffs, mail carriers, public-utility employees, daycare and nursing-home attendants are essential to keeping necessary services running, now more than ever. But many have been viewed historically as expendable instead and have not seen adequate pay and benefits for that […]

In the middle of her life, fortunes falling, my mother bought a little car with the beauty of a well-made toy. It was economical, utilitarian, self-effacing, and anti-macho—all the things she needed or wanted at that point.

Malarial drugs as hope for COVID-19 treatment have been much in the news of late, mostly because President Trump has touted chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine multiple times. “I’m a smart guy,” he said. “I feel good about it. And we’re going to see. You’re going to see soon enough.” He has also suggested drug cocktails such […]

The director of a recent Independent Lens documentary says in interview that her parents bought a small home in 1963. “They easily got a $15,000 mortgage, they stayed there for over 40 years, the house grew in value and turned into their only and best investment. It financed their retirement and my education. I never […]

NPR was talking yesterday about small businesses as the backbone of our economy, and how staying at home during the pandemic will cause bankruptcies down the line, for everyone from the coffee-cart vendor on the corner to childcare providers. Small businesses are 44% of the US economy but “create two-thirds of net new jobs and […]

My mother stood in the pool. I held tightly to the edge with one hand and reached out to her with the other. I knew she was shortening her reach each time, which frightened, angered, and exhilarated me. But she never failed to grasp my hand and pull strongly when needed, so I sailed across […]

This week as I hid behind my laptop from the dangers of the world I became interested again in one of Tom Petty’s songs, “Spike,” which I have listened to many times before. There are probably a dozen live versions on YouTube (Songkick says Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers played 1,123 concerts, which sounds low), […]

Memes can be fun, witty, stupid, or offensive, but they are also used by right-wing and other hate groups to spread propaganda, and their use has increased. A report was released last week on the danger to our country from this “memetic warfare.” “Cyber Swarming, Memetic Warfare and Viral Insurgency: How Domestic Militants Organize on […]

A new documentary, Cooked: Survival by Zip Code, is now streaming on PBS. Directed and produced by Judith Helfand, the film is an adaption of Eric Klinenberg’s first book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. Cooked “tells the story of the tragic 1995 Chicago heatwave, the most traumatic in U.S. history, in […]

Pity the poor writer, still in jammies, fourth cup growing cold, reclined on the couch as people head off to honest jobs. (An argument the night before with his teen son, who said Bill Gates’ talent and his having to code in a garage justify the billions the unwashed do not earn.) A story is coming […]

George Steiner, critic, essayist, and fiction writer, died this week at the age of 90. He published more than 40 books, including The Death of Tragedy; Language and Silence: Essays 1958-1966; In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture; and After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. He wrote regularly for the TLS, […]

Peter Jackson, who made the restoration “documentary” They Shall Not Grow Old, has announced he will release a new, happier, edit of the documentary film Let It Be this year. The film Let It Be was made by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg from the Beatles’ January 1969 “Get Back sessions,” which became their album Let It […]

Family, friends, and other trusted people often serve as back-ups to parts of ourselves we hope to return to. They are our satellite campuses, our branch libraries, our outposts in wildernesses where we do not often go. The other day I posted a screed on social media by a dead political writer, about a long-dead […]

A friend told me he would visit a Chuck Berry house museum if it was filled with guitars. I said it was likely never filled with guitars when Berry was starting out, and it was important that the music came despite (or due to?) a lack of things.

“Minimalism champions living with less, but Marie’s tidying method encourages living with items you truly cherish,” says the site for Marie Kondo, the self-help guru you are probably familiar with, if only as a reader. For a few days last year, some viewers of her Netflix show took to social media to decry her plan […]

Last week I finished three of Pico Iyer’s recent books: Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells (an anatomy of a single season, over the years, in Japan); A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations; and The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere. All are nonfiction, and excellent. For a self-proclaimed non-adherent to […]

It is the season of wooing, in which film studios send their directors and stars to make the circuit of “tastemaker screenings” and build support for Oscar campaigns. Director Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes, is up for several Academy Awards, […]

For many of us who grew up in Illinois, the legalization of marijuana feels weird. Illinois banned cannabis in 1931, and in my little town, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, we called it dope, as if it was a serious thing indeed. My kids make fun of me now for calling it that. Governor Pritzker […]

The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection and Commerce held a hearing this week on the Digital Age and Disinformation, but it was the same morning President Trump spoke, live, about Iran’s retaliation for the Soleimani killing. The hearing on online tech got lost as we all watched to find out if the […]

I re-visited the 10-year old documentary The Civilian Conservation Corps this week, as relief from the news that we were stumbling toward another war. Because of the timing, I found it more moving than the first time I saw it, on PBS’s American Experience. It was directed by Robert Stone—not the novelist, but the documentary […]

Martin Scorsese’s most recent film, The Irishman, is unusual in several ways: It is a Netflix Original (but had a one-month theatrical run). It is three-and-a-half hours long. And it (badly) CGIs the aging actors for flashback scenes. The film also could serve as bookend for Scorsese’s gangster-obsessed career. For all any of us know, […]

In the brief interval between our extended family’s stomach flu and my sudden craving for kimchee (the mouth waters in both cases), I spent one convalescent day on an improvised bed on the floor looking at Cabin Porn. The blog, which began in 2009, features photos of cabins, huts, retreat homes, abandoned and repurposed buildings, […]

Near the site of a teahouse for weary travelers in Bashō’s time, now wilderness, something big crashed around in the brambles and vines on a slope, under which I could hear a stream burbling. Then there was birdsong and a light-filled clearing. I did not want to spend the night with my audience.

I have been thinking of Vladimir Nabokov, who makes a connection between vulgarity and morality in his essay “Philistines and Philistinism,” collected in his Lectures on Russian Literature. The essay is an indictment of consumerism and not thinking for yourself—bourgeois life in the Flaubertian sense. “A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of […]

This week begins the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, when Hitler tried to split the advancing Allied line in the Ardennes and re-take the port of Antwerp. It was his last major counteroffensive. The 75th anniversary of European Theater events really got going on June 6th of this year, for D-Day, and will […]

  Holidays are so soaked in feelings that their public meanings are often mere pretense. Think of those who feel, for instance, that the most important film of Christmas is the one about that guy from 12 Monkeys trying to machine-gun young Severus Snape. The emotional tone of Christmas for me is mostly light and […]

I was headed home on the highway out of the city and wanted fast food real bad. But I did not stop; I never stop on that route. The problem is not the neighborhoods. It is the side roads with metal debris on them waiting to pop a tire or get kicked up through the […]

Bong Joon Ho is a South Korean filmmaker with seven films now, the most recent being 2019’s Parasite, the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and the first unanimous decision by the jury in several years. Bong’s films are often described as black comedies or fables, for their “metaphorical” qualities. The New […]

A star that was ejected from the black hole at the center of our galaxy, five million years ago, was first seen recently, moving at incredible speed. The observation of gamma-ray explosions seven billion light-years away—“the highest-energy light ever seen from celestial sources”—was announced just this year. Our time feels historic; in the realm of […]

As the impeachment inquiry makes clear—again—it is difficult to say that which is so. To say true things colorfully or poetically is harder; comically may be even harder; and directly or briefly the hardest of all. “Simplicity is the final achievement,” Chopin is said to have said. “After one has played a vast quantity of […]

Gettysburg: An American Noh, like most Noh, is nearly plotless. It is “about” a veteran, and descendant of Union General Hancock, who travels to Gettysburg National Military Park, where he meets the ghost of Confederate General Armistead.

The Edwardsville (Illinois) High School had two incidents this month that resulted in the district organizing “listening circles” for parents. On Tuesday, November 5, “EHS Administration was made aware of a racially insensitive and inappropriate social media post that was sent off campus by one student to others via the social media platform, Snapchat,” Dr. […]

For years there were questions about where Eddie Murphy went. It is true that, apart from his Shrek work, and a movie called Mr. Church, in 2016, Murphy has not done much for a long decade. His fans have wondered when his “comeback” might occur. It appears that time has arrived. The first sign is […]

The Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis had special programming on Saturday, but there was time before it began to look at the exhibits and stroll the grounds. Joe, evidently named for Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., sits in a courtyard down a flight of stairs. The sculpture, one of Richard Serra’s “Torqued Spirals,” is a 125-ton […]

It is one thing to live within a system you cannot admire, and another to do something about it. Those who vowed to move to Canada after the re-election of George W. Bush know this, as do those who vow civil war if Trump is impeached. Not feeling good about your subjective experience among the […]

Peter Matthiessen’s The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness was the same book in the 1980s, when I first read it, as it was on publication in 1961. In the 25-year interval forces had changed the Amazon, but their effects were not as apparent as they have become now. This means the […]

The video seems legit, with its corporate-sounding platitudes and scenes of pretty families. “Everyone deserves energy,” it begins. “Energy fuels our favorite moments. But lately, the pathway to prosperity has been blocked. Those who live in the way of energy pipelines are also standing up against them, and it’s for good reason.” Cut to the […]

        My extended family has other obligations on Halloween, so we agreed tonight is the night some of us will watch a scary movie on the side of a neighbor’s building. I am not a fan of horror movies, for some of the same reasons I do not consider Stephen King a […]

The first season of the new streaming comedy Living with Yourself just dropped on Netflix. Each of the eight episodes is under 30 minutes, so the entire season can be binged in a night. It is worth a watch. Paul Rudd (most recently, Ant-Man) plays the starring (dual) role. Irish-born Aisling Bea costars as his […]

For six of the seven years we have owned this house, I have told friends I hoped the next hurricane would just wash it off its slab into the sea—after we were safely north, of course.

How will our alien overlords memorialize us, one day? Which single item will be on display in their Museum of the Milky Way to represent the former human race? Never mind your Space Shuttle, your iPad, your book, rubber tire, ink pen, or corkscrew. It will be something ingenious, wasteful, dangerous, pointless, and which both […]

My son was the only young person in the physical-therapy facility almost in Texas. The elderly were being led back and forth by cables rolling over pulleys. They stepped up and down on machines that went nowhere, turned circles with their feet but did not move. I was having ghost pains, an old woman on […]

It is not a great time in the United States to say you believe in writing, reading, and books, but let me be a brave little culture warrior and proclaim that, along with having rich experiences in the world, they are just the best. I have always been a reader, but keeping books in the […]

I was slow to let my sons play video games with violence in them—freakishly slow, if you ask them, proving how out-of-touch I am with the hip, modern world. (Also: “Hip” is a gross word that old people use; please never say that again.) When they were younger it did make me mildly anxious even […]

I got my first email from the President of the United States on February 1st of this year, on the eve of his second State of the Union Address. “Nancy & Chuck don’t want me to speak, Mainstream Media outlets don’t want me to speak, and the Hollywood Elites don’t want me to speak,” he said. […]

In case you missed it, as I did, here is a list of specific Department of Defense projects deferred at the start of September in order to build $3.6 billion of additional primary and secondary “pedestrian fencing” on our border with Mexico. On September 3, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper wrote a memo that said […]

The rudimentary web page “Spend Bill Gates’ Money” is at neal.fun, a site that also includes “Progress,” which counts down everything from the next minute to when the Milky Way will collide with Andromeda; “Life Checklist”; “Where Does the Day Go?”; and “Who was Alive,” which lets you enter a date. (Neal is Neal Agarwal, […]

Dave Chappelle’s new standup special, Sticks & Stones, has been getting attention for setting out to be provocative in the #MeToo era. “If you say anything, you risk everything,” Morgan Freeman says in the Netflix trailer. Chappelle says he is sick of PC scrutiny: “That’s why I don’t be coming out and doing comedy all […]

The 2019 documentary American Factory is about a Chinese glass company that opened a factory in the United States. The film is good enough to be, well, lacerating at times. When a GM plant closed in 2008 in Dayton, 10,000 people lost their jobs. The repurposing of the plant by Fuyao Glass offered hope for […]

The “When I’m 64 Beatles Festival” was held this weekend in Prairietown, Illinois, “a populated place located within the Township of Omphghent,” not far from St. Louis. It was a perfect day for it, 75 and sunny. Butch Moore and Alan White, who are often performing down at the Stagger Inn in Edwardsville, were playing […]

If you look back through my blog, you will see I was in Japan this summer. For some reason, before I went I guess I thought many restaurants outside of the tourist quarters would serve portions an American might find small, and there would always be rice, and while the food would be tasty, it […]

Humans have long seen nature as a monster. We have tried our banded-together best to destroy it but cannot stop thinking about creatures that never stood a chance against us. The idea of a seven-foot hominid wandering around Texarkana, or the Pacific Northwest, or the Himalayas, is an aftertaste of our fear and hope that such things are still possible.

I am back from Japan, where I had many beautiful experiences, a couple of weird ones, and some I cannot write until later. “Was it transcendent?” my nephew asked at the barbecue at the lake. He is generous and kind, so he was hoping I would say yes, most of all for my sake. It […]

When Bashō, following Zen, implies again and again that life is a dream, something in me rebels. His entire practice was to capture concrete, sensory details of the physical world, so “dreamlike” seems like a contradiction. Yet even his final hokku, dictated as he was dying, and partial because his assistant did not hear the […]

Fifteen miles down the rail line from Hiroshima, City of Peace, is the Kure Maritime Museum, more commonly called The Yamato Museum, a paean to the greatness of Japan’s navy in WWII. The Yamato, largest battleship ever built, was completed at Kure Dockyard the week after Pearl Harbor and was sunk by the US in […]

As the site of the world’s first atomic-bombing, and a consequence of suffering its horrors, Hiroshima calls itself “City of Peace” and promotes nonviolence and nuclear disarmament. But it is also a normal, mid-century-ugly city, with 1.2 million inhabitants, a diverse modern economy, a symphony, museums, parks, a pro baseball team, and irritable cabbies who […]

It was hot in Kyoto, with the Gion Festival underway, and it would stay hot. Globally it was the hottest month in recorded history. In a week, 57 people died in Japan and another 18,347 were taken to hospital for heat injuries. There was a high-pressure front, the news said. The Gion Festival originated in […]

I was caught off-guard, in Matsumoto and then Yamanaka Onsen—the middle of Honshu—to find Bashō again. That was only because I had personalized his journey through northern Japan by walking a small part of it myself. But I knew he returned home by walking down the western coast and across the width of Japan again. […]

At the train station announcers called, Matsumooootoooooo, over and over again, as a Japan Rail employee issued tickets to Hotaka, with Japan’s largest wasabi farm. It was overcast in Nagano Prefecture, hot and muggy despite the elevation of what are called the Japanese Alps. Hotaka, now part of the bigger city of Azumino, is on […]

It was a full day of trains and walking to get from an ancient mountain town to the coast, then down to Yokota Air Base, on the western edge of Tokyo. I was meeting one of my oldest friends there, a retired US Army sergeant-major named Frenchy, who was my boss in military diving. We […]

The man who ran the bodega in a back street of Hijiori Onsen served me three cups of coffee, each in a new cup, with new saucer, when nothing else in town was open. It was seven a.m., and I had been up since five. He looked older than I think he was. I told […]

It was a gorgeous morning, cool and sunny, and I would be under conifers much of the day to cross the Natagiri Pass. Basho and Sora had hired a young man for a guide, who wore a short sword and carried an oak walking stick that could no doubt serve as a cudgel, to cross […]

This day’s walk would be nine miles, with an overloaded pack and 2,100 feet of elevation change. Three trains, including the “Peregrine Falcon,” one of Japan’s fastest shinkansen, took me to Naruko Onsen by 10 am. Full of egg-salad sandwich, yogurt, and coffee, I had a tickle of pleasure in my stomach, and a warm […]

At dawn the fishing boats of Matsushima swung on their anchors with the tide. A flock of cormorants, fishing a few yards from shore, panicked as a group, plashed across the water, and took flight. The port smelled of seawater and diesel. I was headed out for another day on the Basho trail, with more […]

Cyclists were lined up at rail crossings, holding clear umbrellas and wearing clear plastic ponchos, during morning rush hour, somewhere in Tōhoku. The train from Sendai pulled in to an open platform with no station sign, and I asked a boy across the aisle if this was Kokufu-Tagajo. He looked up, alarmed, and by instinct […]

“Don’t follow in the footsteps of the old poets, seek what they have sought,” Matsuo Bashō says, in the Hass translation. Too late: I am in Sendai, Japan, to begin walking a segment of Bashō’s Narrow Road. Besides, Bashō was chasing the poet Saigyō and thinking of other poets’ lives and work, as he and […]

I will be writing from Japan over the next weeks, thanks to The Newman Exploration Center and a Newman Exploration Travel Fund Grant, funded by the Eric P. & Evelyn Newman Foundation, at Washington University in St. Louis. My main activity will be to walk a segment of poet Matsuo Bashō’s journey along the “Narrow […]

Ever wonder what your favorite actors from old TV shows are up to? There is a chance they are down at the Hollywood Show, a fan meet-and-greet at the LAX Westin, as well as in Las Vegas and Chicago. It is in its 40th year. The Show is run by David and Esther Elkouby, owners […]

Spoilers ahead.   After 12 seconds of a mysterious global blackout, the world of Yesterday becomes just a little different from ours. There is Pepsi, but no Coke; Stones but no Beatles. It is as if the secret conceit of the movie, directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) and written by Richard Curtis (Love Actually), is […]

Good writing, like any craft or art, convinces us of its inevitability. “It’s like all your sentences always existed, just waiting around in Style Heaven, or wherever, for you to fetch them down,” the admiring student in Wonder Boys says. Maybe the better word is intentionality: the confidence that a work (novel, painting, song, poem) […]

Rob Connoley, who owns Bulrush STL, was foraging near I-170 this morning with three of his staff. Bulrush is the newly-opened restaurant in St. Louis with “contemporary interpretations of historic (1820-1870) Ozark cuisine.” “Everything is made from scratch, every single day,” Rob said as he picked mulberries from a tree on the grounds of Pinnacle […]

The St. Louis Science Center has an exhibit now called “Pompeii: The Exhibition,” with 150 artifacts on loan from the Naples National Archaeology Museum. “A volcano awakens, a city vanishes,” signs say. Visitors must look first at artifacts of everyday life in Pompeii, then stand through a short CGI movie of Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 […]

“Tim” went to a table read last week for a new episode of the Simpsons, on the Fox Studios lot in Los Angeles. The series is in its historic 30th season, and the episode would not air for a year. He got tickets because a visiting friend knew someone who took a class with the […]

Maybe you remember the Sean Connery ad. Not the one for Jim Beam or Suntory whiskey, or Smirnoff vodka, or Japanese yogurt, or Apple computers, or Rolex watches, or vaguely nautical clothing. I mean the 2008 campaign for Louis Vuitton bags, shot by Annie Leibowitz, with the tagline, “There are journeys that turn into legends.” […]

The spider came out of the molding in the bathroom, saw me, and scurried back into the jamb. It meant me no harm, and if given voice might even admit I am of some use in it making a living. We serve other creatures in many ways, some of them surprising. The latest research from […]

The first season (six episodes) of the new series Catch-22, co-directed and executive-produced by George Clooney, is available now on Hulu. I was cautiously optimistic, going by the trailer that loads up the novel-like bits, and by the enthusiasm of author Joseph Heller’s daughter on social media. A movie was made from the novel in […]

For some butterflies, all of life is a few summer days of nectar and copulation, a few sweet nights of frogs singing from the ditch. Scale matters. A very brief life does not see much, and if lucky, sees only good. A flea can live like a burgher on a dog for its 90 days. […]

  President Donald Trump made a visit to southwest Louisiana’s new Cameron LNG plant yesterday—the same day that the first of its three “trains” (production lines) became operational. There are plans for two more trains at the site, which is 20 miles from the Gulf of Mexico and 30 miles from Texas. The plant is […]

Henry James’ biographer Leon Edel uses an anecdote from James’ nephew Billy, who visited Henry in England in 1902 and says his uncle told him: “Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” As inspirational quotes will, […]

Last Breath is a documentary made in conjunction with BBC Scotland. “This is a true story,” its opening credits say. It uses interviews, original footage, and reconstructed scenes in the mix we have come to know from History- and Discovery-Channel productions. But Last Breath is more harrowing and emotional than any of those. (This review […]

The Lyft driver drove to support his passion, he said: standup comedy. He offered his business card, with his website, phone number, and a long URL at Mixstep, a file-sharing platform, where he had uploaded audio from his 45-minute set. He said he was paid 20 cents every time someone listened, but he laughed at […]

“You’re particularly fragile today,” a friend in LA told me. Writers are a moody bunch, but I remonstrated. “Actually, I’ve been unaccountably happy this week,” I said, which irritated him more. All I could say to explain was that Russell Crowe and other leading men of my age group had been in the tabloids lately, […]

The “Justice at Night” case was an unfortunate slip the first time, when Martha Gellhorn had just turned 28. It probably was not even all her fault. More than 50 years later, however, it was.

Avengers: Endgame comes out tonight. My son asked if I wanted to see it in the theater, and I said I could wait for streaming. Many feel differently. Word on the street is that some believe the movie is a defining moment in a generation, the way Star Wars was, a long time ago in […]

A teen boy broke his leg recently, had surgery, and three weeks later is still bedridden. He wanted to tell me something, he said seriously. I am his primary caregiver, as the phrase goes, which is to say his father and his nurse. As I was shutting the curtains to keep the afternoon sun from […]

Leaving the restaurant, I saw the poster of a rugby player, covered in mud, hair matted, missing teeth, eye swollen shut. He looked like hell, and I laughed. One of my sons wanted to know what my deal was. I was more surprised at not being able to explain handily, than he was at the […]

Going to see a celebrity in a field you do not follow is a strange thing. There are…expectations. Recognition, to start with; maybe admiration, even excitement. I had no idea who the two celebrity fishermen were, who would be at the sporting-goods superstore in town. My elder son, who has fished a couple of times […]

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was in selected theaters Wednesday night. I got my elder son to join me by telling him the Fathom event was a one-night showing. Actually, the film will be available on a streaming service soon, and I was a little embarrassed when it turned out to be a two-hour-and-12-minute […]

The American Society of Civil Engineers has said it will cost $4.5 trillion by 2025 to fix U.S. infrastructure. We have 614,000 bridges alone, a third of them more than half a century old, and 56,000 structurally deficient, says the Federal Highway Administration. One of these, which is vital to coastal traffic but makes locals […]

Having spent some months driving the Mississippi Valley from St. Louis to Gulf—what used to be called “the lower river” by people other than the Army Corps—I am reminded of what there is to be gained by going over the same piece of land again and again. As kids, my friends and I came to […]

Jules:           What is a miracle, Vincent? Vincent:      An act of God. Jules:          And what’s an act of God? Vincent:     When, um … God makes the impossible possible. But this morning I don’t think qualifies.       I tried Burger King’s “Impossible Whopper” today, which is being test-marketed in 59 BK stores in the St. […]

You remember Groucho’s old joke that he tossed like a softball to contestants on You Bet Your Life: Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb? Marx accepted “Grant,” so they could win, but the answer was “no one,” since Ulysses S. Grant and his wife, Julia, are entombed in sarcophagi and not buried in the earth. There […]

The rattlesnake has qualities Texans idealize: fierceness, independent-mindedness, hardiness, strength, a showiness muted by dust. It is the libertarian of the reptile world. Which is probably why Sweetwater loves to hate Western Diamondbacks. They are very alike but in competition.

    The Pine Ridge Reservation, in southwest South Dakota, is having historic flooding. A dozen districts/towns are spread out over 3,500 square miles, making disaster relief more difficult for the Oglala Lakota government. Many residents live miles from main roads, do not have internet access, and heat their homes with wood. The Reservation’s water […]

How many W2s and 1099s did you get this year? It might be a measure of how contemporary you are. A friend told me he got seven W2s, and four 1099s, this tax season. I thought he must be mistaken. But when he reeled them off—one company, then another, then his own business; artistic work; […]

Jealous of others having more Instagram followers than you? Want to be seen as an influencer? Paid services, such as SocialBuddy (“We drive real, targeted people to your Instagram page. Real growth, real audience who are interested in your content”) and SocialSteeze (“Our service helps you grow your Instagram account, with powerful Instagram growth, get […]

About 150 people gathered today, on the mall between the Gateway Arch and the Old Courthouse, for the local Youth Climate Strike. It was sunny but cold, and some of the activists worried about attendance. Thousands were gathering in other states, in Washington, DC, and in capitals abroad. Haven Coleman, co-founder and co-director of the […]

Netflix started in 1997, selling and renting DVDs by mail. The service was a godsend, especially in America’s hinterlands. For several years it seemed as if you could get almost any film you wanted, delivered to your door, back when HBO was limited and expensive, Blockbuster stores already felt stale, and Redbox was just a […]

Avenger Field, outside Sweetwater, Texas, is a working airport and home to the National WASP WWII Museum, dedicated to the memory of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (or Women’s Army Service Pilots). Because of Texas’ climate and available land, the US Army Air Forces established 65 training fields in the state, and Avenger was home […]

If you liked Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys, you will enjoy The Kominsky Method, a Netflix series that started in 2018. Its first season is complete with eight episodes, and Season 2 is reported to be in the works. Wonder Boys (2000) is about a guy who teaches better than he writes. He has a […]

  People outside Louisiana think of Mardi Gras as a New Orleans celebration, but those in the state who live outside New Orleans do not think of it much and have their own traditions. Louisiana Travel, a state booster site, breaks down Mardi Gras celebrations into regions: Greater New Orleans, Northshore [of Lake Pontchartrain], Plantation […]

The World Famous Cajun Extravaganza and Gumbo Cook-Off was held down at the Civic Center this morning. Gumbo is one of those traditions in Louisiana, like Mardi Gras itself, that is both down-home and serious business. Thousands filled the exhibition hall, and spilled onto the lakefront patio, as 60 teams of amateur cooks, Mardi Gras […]

      Joan Didion’s nonfiction book Miami (1987) is a reminder of how good writing captures the problems of its time and—in time—proves them to be continuously-working parts in the bigger movement of history. Miami is more often referred to as reportage than New Journalism, but the “I” of Didion is always there, even when […]

  Carl ships and receives many packages each month, some internationally, for his online business. The plastic chicken he got in the mail from Cambodia last week was not expected. Someone must have sent him the Shrilling Chicken as a joke, he thought, since it looks like a sex doll and the customs form declared […]

Our feelings, thoughts, and memories do not change the great grinding universe. It is Ahab’s main issue, as well as Melville’s.

Every gold mine breeds its own army, Hunter Thompson said. He was talking about Las Vegas, but I read Fear and Loathing when I was about 20 and was headed for the Army’s jungle warfare course in Panama, so I came to think of the phrase differently. I remember landing at what was then Omar […]

One problem for our armed forces is the same as it is for the civilian world: We use devices, the devices collect data on where we are and what we do, and this makes us vulnerable to “bad actors.” As a recent report puts it, “Malicious use of data: the usage of data exploiting vulnerabilities […]

A few years ago I saw on social media that an acquaintance, who is an award-winning poet, drove taxis, Lyft, and Uber in New York City. Always interested in how artists earn their livings, I asked if he intended to use his experiences in his poetry. He did not think so then, but things change. […]

The photo of a US Army Sergeant First Class in dress blues appeared two days ago on a closed Facebook group for veterans. The petite, startled-looking man in the uniform, whose neck could use a good shave to bring him up to regs, has apparently seen a lot of action. His chest is a fruit-salad […]

I take the watch, morning and night. Check on your sleep. Kiss your foreheads. Wake you gently. Have made most of the meals you have eaten and give you the lion’s share, now you need it and I do not. Clean kitchen, clean plates, clean floors, clean toilets, clean tubs, make beds. Paint murals on […]

GPS-enabled apps have changed things so completely, for the average person with access to a device, that it is surprising to remember GPS only became widely available to consumers around the year 2000. What did we do before we had talking maps in our pockets? Printed out sheets of instructions from online maps, I guess, […]

Whenever I hear of ‘culture’… I release the safety-catch of my Browning [pistol]!      —A line in Hanns Johst’s play Schlageter, often misattributed to Nazi leaders   When I hear of Schrödinger’s cat, I reach for my gun.      —Stephen Hawking   When I hear the words ‘phenomenology’ or ‘structuralism,’ I reach for […]

It is a mark of high intelligence when young people get frustrated with their elders for forgetting the past. They suspect somebody is hiding something, or has been careless with their legacy, or was being lazy. How hard is it to remember what relatives were like; what years certain events played out; the proper technique […]

“[I]t is your duty to learn how to resuscitate a lizard,” a writer in Arizona told pool owners in the Southwest, on her blog, in 2014. She provided instructions for CPR. Three years later a woman in Nevada brought a lizard back from a near-drowning in her pool. No word if the two are related, […]

College enrollments in the United States were down again last year, from the previous fall. That would not have been evident by attendance at Tulane University’s recent Louisiana Day. McAlister Auditorium was nearly full of state residents with enough interest in the kids applying to the school, this fall or next, to have taken the […]

Ever stop to memorize something you are experiencing, and it seems as if you can actually feel it grooving into the hippocampus, like cutting a record? Maybe you press harder on the details—especially if you do not have a camera, voice recorder, or even a pen—and go over them repeatedly in your mind until satisfied […]

The Newberry Library in Chicago hosted a 25-hour Moby-Dick Readathon recently. After opening remarks by National Book Award-winner Nathaniel Philbrick, the reading proper got underway, and I jumped ship for a time to have a look at another Chicago celebration of writers, the American Writers Museum. Oddly, the AWM is the first national museum to […]

Chicago has long been a town associated with writers. Look on Wikipedia under “Writers from Chicago,” and there are more than a thousand entries. Some are a bit surprising, like John Cusack. I think most of us think first of Wright, Brooks, Terkel, Algren, Mamet, Sandburg, Dos Passos, Dreiser, Bellow, or Hemingway, and of publications […]

Aurelie Sheehan’s new book, Once into the Night, is a collection of 57 brief stories, in the form of “a fictional autobiography made of assumed identities and what-ifs.” It won FC2’s 2018 Catherine L. Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction and will drop in February. Aurelie is the author of two novels (History Lesson for Girls and […]

Food is a basic human need that can be filled fairly basically—some starch, a nugget of protein, a squeeze of lime to stave off scurvy. But notions about our food get heaped on it, like mangled bacon and garbanzos at a salad bar. Consider food as a test (Eden); food withheld (by the state or […]

You will remember the scene, near the end of the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, when Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) admits to himself, as much as to Nova Corpsman Dey (John C. Reilly), that he is the leader of his gang. “They’ll be fine, Dey,” he says. “I’m gonna keep an eye on ’em.” […]

Johnny was a mess—snide, sneering, insubordinate, a liar—and impossibly old, maybe even 24 or 25. None of us really believed him when he said his previous job was carrying nuclear bombs around on his back. We should have. After Vietnam, the US Army was a mess in general. Johnny was just another of us—the disheartened […]

Remember Thomas Kinkade, “Painter of Light™”? He ripped off the term from JMW Turner and trademarked it, but was more often called “that mall artist.” His achievements, for a decade or more, were impressive—starting with getting “art” into malls for purchase by ordinary folk, who bought it in unprecedented numbers. Joan Didion wrote in 2003 […]

You always read about it: the plumber with the twelve children who wins the Irish Sweepstakes. From toilets to riches. That story. —“Cinderella,” Anne Sexton     Who does not have the feeling, now and then, that the pot of gold is out there, sitting around, waiting for harvest? A woman in England discovered hers […]

The meme is going around again: You are an egg in your mother’s ovaries, and she is a fetus curled in your grandmother’s uterus. The drawing is based on a longstanding scientific belief that human females were born with all the egg cells they would ever have, which made for a matryoshka scenario, three generations […]

Welcome to the year Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) hunts down replicants in the film Blade Runner, which was released in 1982. It is fun to compare a futurist vision to reality, once we get there and look back. Remember the Voight-Kampff test in the film, which identifies replicants as non-human because their empathy is off? […]

Where the hell is a semiotician when you need one? The self-appointed critics of late-stage capitalism? My family received the gift of axe-throwing at Christmas, and I only am escaped alone to tell thee it was satisfying. But what does it mean? Throwing axes for fun and profit was the invention of a Toronto bartender […]

It was New Year’s Eve and not everyone wanted to play a board game. Not that the inevitable unpleasantness was the same every time we played. Things had evolved over the years, taken the shape of current relationships and power struggles within the immediate family. In the early days I equated board with bored—how many […]

A state highway in the south, two hours before dawn, the children asleep. Our headlights side-eye the ghostly-ghastly trees. There is the danger of deer. Making lists, to stay awake: The 400 names for types of forests. This one, which crowds the road through logging country, is called The Survivors Rallied. The Big Thicket, though […]

Here it sits, the haggis, like some offal thing washed up from a distant land. Which it is, of course—a mix of chopped lamb’s liver, beef, oatmeal, suet, onion, bread crumbs, buttermilk, salt, pepper, and ground cloves, in a “beef or fibrous casing,” shipped frozen from the shores of south Florida. My in-laws, who immigrated […]

What would make up for 35 years of dentists and mechanics chortling over my last name? I want to be fair and rational about this, so I suggest we just dig up John Hughes and use his thigh bone to beat out the tempo to the song for National Lampoon’s Vacation on his skull. Hughes, […]

The new documentary They Shall Not Grow Old played in theaters this week, in limited release in the US, for the centennial of the end of World War I. It will presumably be available soon on DVD and a streaming service. The documentary, directed by Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit), […]

Wash U in St. Louis archives the papers of several important American writers, including some who taught here. The William H. Gass collection gathers drafts, manuscripts, hand-corrected proofs, recordings, photos, art, correspondence, and other items of interest connected with Gass, the fiction writer, essayist, cultural/literary critic, and professor of philosophy who taught at Wash U […]

The Midwestern coal-mining town I am from was probably as close to 100% unionized as it was possible to be, in the first decades of the twentieth century, from the UMWA, trade and craft unions, and sympathies of business owners, families, and friends. This typically meant voting for those with progressive (or at least pro-worker) […]

The Angola Rodeo survives when other prison rodeos have closed because, of all places in America, Angola is the perfect stage.

Bridges are opportunity frozen in steel, a chance to pass from one side of an obstacle to the other. The Chain of Rocks Bridge, which crosses the Mississippi River north of downtown St. Louis, is a truss bridge finished in 1929. For many years it was part of Route 66 but was closed to traffic […]

The producers of the Epix TV series Get Shorty, about (small) organized crime going to Hollywood for new opportunities, say it is merely “influenced by” the Elmore Leonard novel of the same name. They even suggest that a security guard at the studio in the series, who waves a car onto the lot and says […]

With the second season of the new Get Shorty TV series now available, I wanted to revisit Elmore Leonard’s 1990 novel (previous post) and the 1995 movie of the same name. What happens when a narrative spine is used to make a new animal? In the case of the Barry Sonnenfeld movie Get Shorty, the […]

Get Shorty is a TV series with two seasons in the can and rumors of a third. The first season was released by a lesser-known subscription service, Epix, in August 2016 and found its way to Netflix this year. The second season was released by Epix in August 2018 but has not been shared to […]

French actress Stéphane Audran died this year at 85. Audran had a long career and more than 100 film and TV credits. She worked with directors Luis Buñuel, Éric Rohmer, and former husband Claude Chabrol, was in The Big Red One with Lee Marvin, and played the title character in the 1987 Danish film Babette’s […]

The new Coen Brothers movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, was released on Netflix November 16, after a (very) limited theatrical release. The National Board of Review made it a top-10 pick for 2018, and it won an early award (for best screenplay) in Venice. The Coens are auteurs, so they make Coen movies, which […]

Here come the mannequins Avert your eyes Avert your eyes Tall and cool and terrible no common ground no common ground for you and me they’re an awful sight to see …       The tourists looked glumly through the windows of the wax museum. It was closed for the day, and the wind […]

When they conquered distant lands, the Romans erected fornices and triumphal arches to help locals celebrate becoming Roman subjects. Ungrateful Gauls and Britons had other feelings: “If … we bend our necks to the yoke, the Romans do but lay on heavier burdens, as if we bore them lightly. We used only to have one […]

When I topped the bridge, smoke twisted like tornados from the stacks of chemical plants in Sulphur and Westlake and rose a thousand feet into the sky. It is hard to say why the scene impressed me this time. We live with the industrial: city-sized puzzles of pipes and tanks that glitter under the sun […]

The reason we are told to make lemonade from the lemons that life gives us is obvious: Lemons rot because no one but unsuspecting babies in YouTube videos eats them raw. But as a commodity, lemonade is problematic too. Sugar is not local to our lemon grove and is costly, and anyway in lemonade we […]

I was not thinking of the modern catastrophes of movement and making-do that end so many human relationships in our time. For some reason I was thinking of Bobby McHein.

The gun show was small, which was fine with me. We would not have to shuffle-walk through the civic center for long. I left my eyeglasses in the car and wore a military-themed shirt but fooled no one. Just past the ticket counter, where everyone entered and automatically turned left, was the booth for the […]

Back in what was called (affectionately in the military) the Reagan-Bush years, I got out of the Army, did a bachelor’s in English and philosophy, then realized I needed a job. I had one unsolicited offer, to manage a city-park facility where I worked summers with a team of disadvantaged kids. My father-in-law-to-be thought law […]

Sunday is Veterans Day, which Woodrow Wilson set in motion in 1919, when he asked the country to remember the armistice that ended WWI. Now it is a day to honor all those who have served in the military—distinct from Memorial Day (those killed serving in war) and Armed Forces Day/Week (those serving now). There […]

If you were looking for a place to represent the split in the country last night, I-170 in St. Louis was a good place to start. For several days an electronic billboard near Saint Charles Rock Road shined forth, seeming to equate Donald Trump with Jesus Christ by captioning a photo of him: “The Word […]

I was startled to see William T. Sherman, scourge of the South, on the Delmar Loop the other day. His name was underfoot on one of the hundreds of bronze stars in the sidewalks that honor those with some connection to St. Louis. Chuck Berry, Redd Foxx, T.S. Eliot, and Agnes Moorhead, the mother-in-law on […]

    As I was headed to see the earthquake museum there last week, New Madrid, Missouri, felt a 3.3-magnitude quake. This is not unusual. In the last six months alone there have been more than 100 temblors in the New Madrid Seismic Zone, according to the Center for Earthquake Research and Information (CERI) at […]

Where I grew up, just north of the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, towns were often named for more famous places (Cairo, Golconda, Cadiz, Galatia, Corinth, Sparta, Denmark, Vienna, Mt. Vernon) or with ringing optimism (Future City, Urbandale, Metropolis, Eldorado, America, Rising Sun, Herod, Equality). Grandiose or not, they sounded like something you […]

      The holiday movie-watching season is near, and Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is one of the classics. Steve Martin and John Candy, as I am sure you remember, are forced by mishaps into two days of bad travel together, on their way to Thanksgiving Day. The movie was released in 1987 and holds up well, […]

The stretch of coastal Louisiana called Acadiana, from the Texas border to almost New Orleans, is often sold as a foodie culture, though its people would never call it that. The Francophone foodway has adapted to local resources, so French mirepoix, for instance, (carrots, celery, onion) became the Cajun “holy trinity” (green bell pepper, celery, […]

Coastal Louisiana is sinking, and the sea is rising, faster than anywhere on earth. Water cuts through everything—in gutters, culverts, ditches, swales, bayous, rivers, estuaries, channels, and lakes. Tropical downpours flood the streets, stall traffic, pour over doorsills into homes. Geysers spurt out of manhole covers. Cattle stand in mud on the edge of town, watching […]

  Puddles Pity Party was in town last night. I felt like the guy in front of me in line for the second Star Wars movie, in 1980, who poured bags of loose change onto the ticket counter and cried, “I’ve been waiting for this for three years!” If you are still living in the […]

San Francisco (1936) is a four-star film at Turner Classic Movies. It stars Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, and Spencer Tracy, and is set in the months leading up to the 1906 earthquake. IMDB says it is about “A Barbary Coast saloonkeeper and a Nob Hill impresario [who] are rivals for the affections of a beautiful […]

Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast thou walked in the search of the depth? —Job 38:16   The Old Minster at Winchester Cathedral was built in 645 AD. By the year 1000 there was a cathedral there about one-third the size of today’s. But the site was swampy and peaty, […]

I went to a reading the other night for someone I have known for a decade. I call him a friend, but really we are something between Facebook friends and former colleagues who rarely saw each other in person. We have kept in spotty touch, and several times he was generous enough to Skype-in to […]

        Driving across the Midwest at harvest, one experiences again the long vistas of sun slanting on fields, dust rising from combines, farmhouses and pole barns at great distances like Monopoly houses waiting on a roll of the dice. Cornucopia, plenty, gratitude, safety, blessings:   Come, ye thankful people, come, Raise the […]

Brace yourself: I have discovered an American middle-class couple who leave their phones on the kitchen table when they work elsewhere in the house or in their yard, and they do not check them when they come back. They also turn their phones off at night, and when they leave the house to go out, […]

In just about every measure the American middle- and upper-middle class act like new money. One need only glance at photos on social media that portray consumption and appearance to see that our culture violates all the “golden rules” —if you believe in that sort of thing—of those who have long had money: “Don’t tell […]

NPR ran a story this week on a new “space mining” program at the Colorado School of Mines, which turned out to be misleading. In reality, it is “The first program in the world focused on educating scientists, engineers, economists, entrepreneurs, and policy makers in the developing field of space resources.” CSM’s intent is to […]

A parlor game for those with more pallor than parlor: What would we do if we had no debts, no deadlines, nowhere we had to be? (No restrictions at all is so silly it shatters the fantasy; there are no games without rules.) The dollar amounts are not so large, after all, when we consider […]

You know that old joke about English majors: “They don’t know anything, but they know where to go to find things out.” I resemble that remark. And as a former English major and common reader, I see that learned skill as one of the glories of what we tremble to call liberal education. Because let […]

“This all kind of started because of a sarcastic comment that Peggy made on Facebook last fall,” Greg says of his wife, a privacy attorney with her own firm in Atlanta. “Someone had just gotten a Jawa costume approved by the Georgia Garrison of the 501st, and it turned out we had a relative lot […]

Communities provide and take away, two forms of power that reinforce and balance each other until they do not. Bigger communities, such as cities, states, or nations, provide opportunities to earn a living; infrastructure such as roads to get to work and the store; and mutual aid—firefighters save our homes while we teach their kids. […]

Groucho Marx visited the wreckage of the Führerbunker, in East Berlin, in 1958 with his young daughter. The remains of the structure were broken and jagged but still 20-feet tall, as if the war was just over. Groucho climbed up and began to do “a frenetic Charleston, for at least a minute or two, in […]

Fifteen years ago a drunk and high driver smashed into the car that Charles and his wife were traveling in. Charles was badly hurt, had reconstructive surgeries, and continues to have crippling headaches several days a week. Because he has been prescribed many drugs, which often fail over time, he took note when The National […]

Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 standup special, Nanette, contains a brilliant trick that has nothing to do with the special’s title, which is merely the name of a love interest who did not work out.The trick is that Gadsby begins with a traditional standup routine then uses the occasion to tear down the very basis of standup […]

Standups who do something other than crack jokes are not new or unusual. Carlin’s act consisted of tearing down cultural conceits with jazzy profanity. Rickles was still slinging insults at 87 when he sat down with Jerry Seinfeld in Comedians in Cars and talked about playing clubs in the early days. (“Sir, is that your […]

Comedian Dave Chappelle released four standup specials in 2017 that are considered his return to show business, after quitting Chappelle’s Show in 2006. The way he suddenly left the successful show (and a $50 million contract with Comedy Central) led to rumors he had a drug problem or mental health issues. Chappelle has hinted in […]

Larry and I met years ago in the cubicle-pen of a Fortune-1000 company. Looking back, our separate paths through jobs and geographies now seem to have meandering coherency.

Something odd and beautiful happened to Jess Stacy that night in 1938. It is easy to have the impression he never experienced anything quite like it again. Stacy had played piano for the Benny Goodman orchestra since 1935 and was on stage the night they (with other musicians) played the Carnegie Hall concert of January […]

Local media has been reporting the demise of St. Louis’s Chinatown, another victim of big-box development. But it is not so much a Chinatown—officially it is called the Olive Link—as a small polyglot area of Olive Boulevard near Highway 170, which the Post Dispatch calls “the gritty back door” of University City. University City is […]

Writer John McNally’s work has appeared in more than 100 periodicals and anthologies. He is the author of two story collections, three novels (one of which became a YA book), a memoir, and three books for creative writers, including most recently The Promise of Failure: One Writer’s Perspective on Not Succeeding (2018, University of Iowa Press). […]

A professor I knew was very interested in the ways class got represented in fiction. He pointed out that due to the vagaries of fashion there would always be new markers of it available to writers. One of his favorites then was “bad teeth,” by which he meant crooked or less-than-white teeth. (This used to […]

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Hot Wheels, the little cars that are the number-one selling toy in the world. Manufacturer Mattel has a 16-city tour in progress that includes a design contest, life-size fleet, die-cast historical display, and Forza X-Box gaming. My mother, who was 42 years old when I was born (her […]

If you use social media, you know the difficulties. How to feel about those who love something you love but who, you believe in the sub-basement of your heart, have missed the point? A childhood friend, educated, prosperous, posts a tribute to Aretha Franklin on his wall. “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” he writes. The only problem: he’s not […]

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!   A municipal garden is a beautiful contradiction, an embodiment of the struggle between nature and human control. Visitors to The Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis on a recent afternoon stepped from the welcome center into the Garden grounds, where the skyscraper glint of the Climatron […]

  The 1818 novel Frankenstein, which has birthed so many subsequent versions, was itself an update of the Promethean myth for Mary Shelley’s time. We might fairly call Frankenstein its own myth now, told by each teller in her own register. William Gass would say these versions are from “the realm of Forms,” and are […]

Will Mackin became a literary friend when we both wrote briefly for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. His excellent “Dispatches from Iraq” there (written as Roland Thompson) were sharply observed and sometimes surreal. “I can understand the dogs, too,” he says in the final installment. “[One] looked at me and said, ‘Sometimes sedition, sometimes blight.’ Months later, after […]

Most everyone knows that bit from Thoreau on technology and communication in his time:   “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. […] We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important […]

Take Highway 55 east from St. Louis, to Illinois 70, then into the rolling hills, soybeans, and hamlets where Lincoln lunched to find Carlyle Lake, the biggest manmade lake in Illinois. The Army Corps capped 69 oil wells and dammed the Kaskaskia River to make the 15-mile-long lake, which was finished in 1967. There’s a […]

“[S]o-called children’s books I don’t like and don’t believe in,” Chekhov wrote to a friend in 1900. “Children ought only to be given what is suitable also for grown-up people.” He had in mind the tales of Tolstoy and books of history and travel such as The Frigate Pallada, by Ivan Goncharov, about a Russian […]