The Headband Makes a Comeback
Trained to respect a look that requires, then conceals, significant effort, women learned to mistrust anything that was just plain easy.
People & Places
Winnie the Pooh Would Have Loved This
If the bees' queen begins to falter, they induce her replacement, as political parties have been known to do. If she dies, the entire colony realizes it can no longer smell her scent, and a “queenless roar” goes up, an agitation that triggers the raising of the next queen.
Why Food Is Less Healthy and Less Tasty
Nobody mentioned that we would be eating more because we were still craving the kind of taste we barely remembered, and we were still in need of the vitamins and minerals that had been leached from these big juicy hollow tomatoes and this gluteny, mineral-stripped wheat.
Invent a New Kind of Femininity
“Thinking about what aging means for the trans child,” Miranda July jotted in a writing notebook. “…. And how the physical changes of middle age/old age out anyone who is living as more feminine than they were born.”
Jackie Robinson, Baseball Hero, Liberal or Conservative?
Robinson’s Republicanism, coupled with the fact that he was a high-performance athlete who believed in objective measures of merit and the validity of competition, explain why he hated the idea of lowering standards for Blacks. In this regard he is not different from Wynton Marsalis, Albert Murray, Ralph Ellison, and the late Stanley Crouch.
Requiem for an Unwritten Memoir
Opera aficionados and many St. Louisans already knew about her. Somehow, I did not. Being in Bumbry’s presence magnified my own desires to pursue the creative arts, travel the globe, and know more than one language. Very much like another famous St. Louisan Josephine Baker, Grace Bumbry’s life and story shattered the limitations of what is possible for Black Americans.
The Black Women of Gee’s Bend Work Hard and Easy
Mothers sewed these quilts when everyone else was asleep, so there was no time to fuss over the details. For batting, they beat the dirt out of trash cotton or swept the floor of the cotton gin. Quilts were women’s work, therefore practical and unquestioned. How were these women to know, tucked into a paper-clip curve of the Alabama River with scant access to the rest of the world, that their quilts echoed the best and most daring modern art?
Ghost Towns of St. Louis
This photo, like so many of those in Michael Eastman’s beautiful, moving, beguiling, maddening collection, transmutes history into timelessness. The house stands alone outside of time. It is a token of the past detached from its actual and ongoing social history.
Unexpected Mardi Gras Moments in St. Louis
I was surprised to discover, having moved north from French-Catholic Louisiana, where I experienced three distinct types of Mardi Gras celebrations, that St. Louis residents liked to say they had the second-largest Mardi Gras celebration in the country after New Orleans, as if it was inevitable, based on historical ethnicity.
When Kitsch Collides With Food (And Spirits)
(Courtesy of Empirical) Andy Warhol once said he loved Coca-Cola because regardless of who bought a bottle, it remained the same product for everyone. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one…