One Tree Is Enough
The tensions that wire our lives do not go dead. Every time I try to look away, they crop up again, disguised or insidious. But Sylvia Plimack Mangold fixed her gaze and stared them down.
Arts & Letters
The Conspiracy of Bad Coffee Is Real, but Ending Soon
(Jakub Dziubak via Unsplash) Every so often the forces of new scientific findings and opinion columns align to produce a certain sense of dread and unease. In this case, that dread and that unease are acute if you believe in the power and pleasure of a…
Was the Eclipse Anticlimactic?
Totality. Just the word feels like an exhale. The reassurance of awe, of completion. The promise of grasping an immensity whole, rather than contenting oneself with the usual sliver.
Will Our Hyphens Join Us or Divide Us?
This is a concept country, like one of those cool demo cars that never get made because they are too flawed to be practical. Except, the nation did get made. We are still figuring out how to punctuate that reality.
New Documentary Shows Steve Martin’s Lonely Art and Happy Life
Fans of Martin’s will be rewarded for watching more than three hours of documentary about his life. What emerges is a portrait of an anxious introvert acting like an extreme extrovert for fun and profit.
Steinbeck and the Baby Bunny
Nature is red in tooth and claw, I mutter to myself. But how could our gentle dog be so cruel?
Easter Baskets Will Arrive Per Contract, Cartel Insists
Children grow up, go to school, get jobs, may have their own families, and at some point usually stop getting gifts from magical beings. But it is not that the magic does not exist. It is that the children themselves have become part of the great, benevolent cartel of nurturers of warmth and plenty.
Fables of the Deconstructions: Carl Marsh reworks R.E.M. songs with Mike Mills, David Mallamud, and SLSO
Mike Mills told Carl Marsh he did not want trite symphonic embellishments of R.E.M. melodies—he wanted new music for orchestra with R.E.M. songs encoded somewhere within them.
The Lost Joys of Flying a Kite
Flying a kite is the simple pleasure of celebrating, in the quietest but most glorious way, winter folding into spring.
How a Science Fiction Writer Reinvented St. Louis
In Eric von Schrader’s books, St. Louis remains a colossus of bricks, careful not to destroy its solid and elegant legacy. And Cahokia! It has been rebuilt by a pair of archaeologists, one Osage, the other White, who were fired from Washington University for their absurd insistence on the site’s significance.