I will begin by apologizing: surely “leftist” is no longer the right word. Is “progressive”? You know how old liberals grumble about new vocabulary; we are as grumpy as the other side these days. But geez. Instead of allowing helpful new words to take root, you guys swing them like police batons. […]
Parks are lonely places in November, washed in cold gray. The dog and I are the only large, readily visible creatures for miles. But we are together. When there is no “together,” life takes on an unwelcome austerity. And that is happening all over the country. Loneliness, the media tell us, is epidemic. […]
I was raised to tell white lies. To tell White lies, the sort my people use to shelter one another from unpleasant truths. No raw honesty seeped into our proper world, just bland assurances and an endless trove of compliments. For some, the goal was simply the expectation: nicey-nice. For my mother, though, […]
According to Jerry Seinfeld, St. Louis is (sort of) his alpha and omega. He was in town for a standup concert last night at the Enterprise Center, an 18,000-seat venue where the St. Louis Blues play. Seinfeld said when his sitcom “bombed” originally, appearing in a bad slot midweek after Unsolved Mysteries, […]
The St. Louis Anthology opens with a quote: “St. Louis is on indigenous land. This land is the traditional, unceded homelands of the Illini Confederacy: the Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Moingwena, Peoria, and Tamaroa tribes; and also the Osage and Miami. Through this land also passed the Cherokee, Delaware, Kickapoo, Sac and Fox, and […]
In our current polarized atmosphere, it helps to take a break from heated arguments and instead examine policy ideas that both sides of the aisle seem to agree are bad. In this case, that policy idea is the proposed building of a whole new slate of U.S. cities. This curious idea was proposed […]
Shortly after 9-11 a photo in the news showed a New York City street covered with rubble, ash, and an ad, blown from the side of a bus, with Ben Stiller making the pouty face of his character Derek Zoolander. Through no fault of the actor, the movie, or even the […]
The historical facts regarding Soviet-Russian dictator and revolutionary Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler’s sadistic roommate in the twentieth-century house of horrors, fall like so many blows to the head. As with so many Russians and many things Russian, Stalin—although technically Georgian—is a figure whose reputation precedes him. His “kill rate,” so to speak, […]
When fantasizing about courage, some of you gallop into battle astride a horse; some dive into churning waters to rescue a drowning child; some disable a crazed man who’s firing an AR-15 into a crowd. I join the French Resistance. After soaking up every episode of Transatlantic and envisioning my job with the […]
The Socialism 2023 conference was held in Chicago, September 1-4, at the Hyatt Regency McCormick Place hotel, near the lakefront. It was a beautiful Labor Day weekend in the city. The timing of Labor Day was no coincidence, of course, though the venue might be said to have had a whiff of the […]