Chicago has long been a town associated with writers. Look on Wikipedia under “Writers from Chicago,” and there are more than a thousand entries. Some are a bit surprising, like John Cusack. I think most of us think first of Wright, Brooks, Terkel, Algren, Mamet, Sandburg, Dos Passos, Dreiser, Bellow,…
Setting forth for the central coast of California, we, a Midwestern couple en route on our first spring break as adults’ post-college, ventured from San Francisco, where we sipped dark roast coffee in the Castro and ate at a cult-following sandwich shop predicated on love and an obscene offering of…
Food is a basic human need that can be filled fairly basically—some starch, a nugget of protein, a squeeze of lime to stave off scurvy. But notions about our food get heaped on it, like mangled bacon and garbanzos at a salad bar.
Consider food as a test (Eden); food…
In the foodie world, as in most worlds now mediated online, there is intense pride at having a recipe “go viral.” Samin Nosrat, the delightful author of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat and the ensuing Netflix series based on the cookbook, admits as much in her recent confessional-recipe (it is a…
You will remember the scene, near the end of the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, when Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) admits to himself, as much as to Nova Corpsman Dey (John C. Reilly), that he is the leader of his gang.
“They’ll be fine, Dey,” he says. “I’m gonna…
In an increasingly noisy world, it may seem impossible to find peace amongst the cacophony of busy roads, blaring sirens, and roaring machinery.
That is, unless you are a wood frog.
New research from Pennsylvania State University shows these pocket-sized pollywogs are becoming immune to the stresses…
Nishta J. Mehra (Credit: Lauren Schoen)
I first met Nishta J. Mehra in 2005 when we studied creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona’s MFA program. Her prose was, and is, agile, buoyant while being direct, and strong. She also routinely brought baked goods to our class workshops, and, honestly,…
Johnny was a mess—snide, sneering, insubordinate, a liar—and impossibly old, maybe even 24 or 25. None of us really believed him when he said his previous job was carrying nuclear bombs around on his back. We should have.
After Vietnam, the US Army was a mess in general. Johnny was…
Most mornings do not begin by walking across a snow-covered campus as a young man in flame-colored pants and an intergalactic backpack—think the cosmos meet tie-dye—blasts AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell.” Is the music emanating from his phone, I wonder? A portable bluetooth speaker placed just so? Am…