Last week, even a Martian could have heard the buzz of anticipation in WashU’s Graham Chapel. Its pews were smooshed with an overflow audience eager to hear Tim Alberta, staff writer for The Atlantic, make sense of something we have struggled with for a decade: how to reconcile Christian support for a president […]
A Reddit thread Tuesday night lit up with rumors that Elon Musk was on the move again, this time to the VA (the Department of Veterans Affairs). Some commenters were freaking out. The worry was that Musk and his young disciples would push past security in order to access military service […]
“You know you have a crack in this back molar?” the hygienist asks, poking with a sharp thing. “Um…no?” She nods briskly, insists on showing me with a little mirror. “Wwwhat do we do about that?” I ask, using the plural to comfort myself. They are my team, right? We are all invested […]
In the only recorded inter-species war in human history, the humans lost. Meet the victor. Skinny, leggy, frizzy-haired and feathered, with a long, pale blue neck, buggy amber eyes, and wings too short to fly. Instead, they flap when the emu runs, spindly legs blurring at thirty miles per hour. Emus may not […]
To know someone you love died trapped, their body scorched and melted by wildfire? To stand and watch a home that has been your sanctuary for thirty years burn to the ground? To then comb through the rubble and find nothing you can salvage, or worse, see an album of wedding photos so […]
When Stephen Sondheim flew into town to accept the St. Louis Literary Award, my friend Lana Pepper, then president of the organization bestowing the prize, planned a dinner for him. Upon learning that Sondheim only drank vodka, Lana, the quintessential host, drove all over town in a frenzy, because the only vodka […]
Grinning, I requested Want, Gillian Anderson’s collection of women’s anonymous sexual fantasies, from our all-knowing small-town library. Why not? If a few were especially intriguing, I could read them aloud to my husband in a husky voice…. He saw the book on the kitchen table and snuck it away the next time he […]
I recognize the email address; this guy has written to me periodically over the years, either to share outrage over some social injustice, add a little insight, or offer warm concern. Now, for the first time, he is the one in trouble: he says he is about to be evicted […]
I am fussing over the slavering contributions to Trump’s inaugural fund—especially the millions forked over by CEOs who are unlikely, in the privacy of their suites, to even deem him presidential. “Is everything pay-to-play now?” I exclaim. The silence of the newspaper that broke Watergate can now be bought, and the giants of […]
In A French Village, when her son is killed by a German bomb, a man tells the keening mother to “Be dignified.” I would slap him, but instead she pulls herself together. In a later episode, a young woman is fired from her job as a maid because she is Jewish. She turns […]