Seven Words English Needs
Look at the holes in English vocabulary, and you realize what our culture lacks.
Arts & Letters
‘Nuremberg’: Holocaust as Melodrama
In the end, the only thing to be done with a movie like this is to throw it to the wolves of Reddit.
The Commencement Speech Is Bigger Than We Know
Some way, somehow, commencement speakers come to embody the ideals and principles of millions of hard-working students who some way, somehow, want their ideals and principles embodied in the choice of commencement speakers across hundreds of institutions of higher education. Basic laws of probability tell us the majority of these choices will not match.
How Vines and Stories Intertwine
Who knew reading and gardening had such overlap?
The Devil Wears Prada in St. Louis, Too
The following sentence just begs for snorts of derision, and I can imagine Stanley Tucci’s character rolling his eyes. But The Devil Wears Prada 2 parallels to the Midwestern magazine world.
Sure, our versions are inevitably smaller scale and far less sophisticated, less privy to talent, couture, exposure. Budgets and…
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.
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.