Excellent Days
‘Perfect Days’ (2023), directed by Wim Wenders, challenges us, starting with its title, to consider what it means to live an enlightened, fulfilled life.
Arts & Letters
The Solace of a Half-Empty Photo Album
Somewhere between pages 25 and 30, showcasing my daughter’s fourth-grade photo and Christmas of 2015, the images cease, as if my photo album took a different route from my own at some mysterious fork in time. Somehwere between the physical world and the ether of the digital, years slipped away, as if they never took form.
Who Is Afraid of the Bible?
Through centuries of existence, in a multitude of translations, and in myriad versions and bindings, the Bible has never mustered victory in any battle besides sheer force of influence. Even then, and up against all the glories and benefits its believers promise, it still finds plenty of ways to fall short. Put both of those qualities together, and you get a book everyone should read, even in taxpayer-funded public schools.
How to Get Along in the Universe
How this volume of six hundred pages of Kazakh poetry landed in a town library in St. Louis’ Metro East is a mystery, but it has met its goal.
Turner’s Fire For Our Time
What Turner’s remarkable painting of that long-ago night in London reminds us, though, is that if fire’s wrath is not ours to contain, it will always remain dormant and waiting for our homage, whether framed or not.
If I Buy Your Groceries
I wrote this little memoir in the spirit of a Cupid, hoping someone out there hears me and tries this out and buys some lonely person who looks like they can really cook their groceries and they cook you dinner and in fact they can really cook well. Dinner together is delicious, and you take it from there, hopefully, expectantly, both of you taking your chances on love and food.
How Pop Culture Made Revolution Safe, or at Least Safer
Rather than skulk in the corners of history some of the most turbulent figures in radical left terrorism found fertile afterlives in popular culture, both film and music, that treat them alternately as doomed romantics or curious, bizarre artifacts.
Installation of the Gerald Early Endowed Chair
Chancellor Martin called the ceremony “a profound testament to friendship, scholarship, and the enduring impact of extraordinary individuals. The Gerald Early Distinguished Professorship represents more than an academic honor. It commemorates the legacies of two remarkable men who have been integral to Washington University: Chancellor Emeritus William H. Danforth and Professor Gerald Early…one of the most significant scholars of our time.”
An Engaging Christmas
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.
How the Candyman Films Examine the White Savior Complex and Exploitation Through Art and Collective Trauma
The “Candyman” films have a vision for their critiques of exploitative art. For those overcoming experiences with trauma, art immortalizes both pain and healing. These films have messages to tell the world about both, but they also want to have messages about many things.