AI Targets Writers and Editors
A few days ago, a man in Memphis messaged me by LinkedIn to ask if I was the person who had offered to help him market his book. When I said no, he showed me the email that offered to make his novel a smash hit.
Arts & Letters
AI and the Inhabited Body
Poetry is a different embodiment in words of the experience of being human. AI does not (yet) understand the mysteries, perspectives, uncertainties, and feelings—the experience itself—of inhabiting a body in the physical world.
Murder in the Heart, Ink in the Veins
I found the book in a box in a storage locker just as I was writing a recent piece about a murderer. The amazing thing, the admirable thing, is that William Steig channeled his deep feeling into art over a very long life. The murder stayed in his dreams.
Catch Us If You Can
The Cardinals under Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog (nicknamed the White Rat) were the daredevils of St. Louis in the 1980s, our biggest disappointments and our greatest heroes. St. Louisans lived and died for the guys who wore the birds on the bat. And this era was named for the style that the Cardinals brought to the game, Whiteyball.
The Speculative Value of a Stolen Literary Bust
By the time it was gone, the change was subtle but unmistakable: one corner left without its figure, one pedestal left bare. But to understand why that absence matters, it helps to understand who Kate Chopin was and the stories she wrote.
The Biography of a Library
I have always loved my library. I have kept it with me, growing with me, since adolescence, through marriages and divorces, through changes in occupation from student to steelworker, from truck driver to college professor, and moved it from San Diego to Chicago, to Los Angeles, to Cincinnati, and finally to New York City.
The Social Strikes Against Baseball
Baseball is our national pastime, steeped in the bucolic idyll of rural America. But it is also a deeply conservative social and economic institution. Peter Dreier and Robert Elias trace these divisions in the companion volumes “Baseball Rebels” and “Major League Rebels,” telling the story of individuals who sought to challenge the way in which the game is played and administered.
Our Haunted Fascination for Life After Death and Death After Life
“I Was Alive Here Once” contains many different types of ghosts in many different stories, fables, and fairy tales, from many different cultures. Sometimes, the world we know is the ghost in the story; the aftermath of war, the wreckage of environmental destruction, lingers in the background of tales driven by the supernatural. Other times, the ghosts blend into our reality, and the supernatural takes a backseat, with ghosts that hardly even know that they are ghosts.
The Concessions of Clarity and the Politics of Recognition
Certain narratives travel more easily. Certain aesthetics are more readily absorbed into festival circuits that reward particular kinds of storytelling. The slow, observational film that gestures toward universality. The politically charged narrative that renders its context legible to an external audience. These are not the only films being made, but they are often the ones that circulate most visibly beyond their point of origin.
Ancient Splendor (and the Ambivalence of Its Ethics)
When you walk into the Saint Louis Art Museum’s new exhibit—Ancient Splendor: Rome in the Time of Trajan—the emperor himself greets you. His right hand is raised, index finger lifted: he is about to speak. The commanding air comes naturally to him; he rose through the army, suffering hardship alongside…