“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 […]
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 […]
Chris Bruneau, Republican candidate for US Congress, lives in Bel Air, Maryland, 30 miles northeast of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. This is Maryland’s 1st Congressional District, the state’s largest district and only deep-red one. The upright of its L-shape comprises eight of the state’s top-10 counties with the most farmland, on the Eastern Shore of […]
Population 2,313, Wellston sits immediately north of University City, though most living and learning south of Delmar likely know it primarily for its Metro stop en route to the airport. On November 21, that changed, or started to change, at least, with the “Wellston Loop Family Reunion & Exhibit” organized by Steven Friedman and Washington […]
It is possible that I am the only person I know in the Washington University community who knows Ferguson moderately well. By that I mean, I knew it before Michael Brown, and I came to “reknow” it after. I toasted craft beers at its brewery, purchased late-night munchies at its Schnucks, navigated its rows of humble […]
“This is, genuinely, my idea of beauty. This is life after cities. This is life after humans.” We are staring at 57 acres of overgrown wildlife comprising the former Pruitt-Igoe, one of the most iconic modernist feats in the history of public housing, and also one of the most catastrophic failures. The “we” in question […]
As the Gateway to the West, St. Louis might well also be called the Gateway to Ardent Gating. Arguably prescient of a national shift in civilian traffic from public space (parks, squares, promenades) to private (fitness centers, Apples stores, capacious motor vehicles) this gate-gusto has likewise contributed to a prevailing ethos of “keep out,” especially […]
