On Claude McKay’s Birthday: September 15, 2021
In honor of Claude McKay’s birthday, here are two rarely republished sonnets from his 1922 collection "Harlem Shadows," the Harlem Renaissance’s earliest book of poetry.
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How a Company Called BlackRock Shapes Your News, Your Life, Our Future
Who controls the corporations who control our news? A helpful index was just compiled—not by mainstream media, but by Harvard researchers exploring media’s future. Skimming the list, I see two names again and again: BlackRock Fund Advisors and Vanguard Group.
Leon Spinks Once Blew Up the World
The world gets blown up so often these days that everyone has gotten used to it. Leon Spinks’s nervous system was not what it used to be, and neither was anyone else’s.
How Are These Crimes Different?
What makes the difference here? White man versus Black female? A harsh prosecutor, in Owens’s case, at a time with little oversight of the legal system? We will likely never know. But there is so much talk about inequity and injustice that it sometimes washes over me. Seeing the particulars unfold is a lot more painful.
What Can Be Said About 9-11? When?
“Flags of Valor,” a memorial outside the St. Louis Art Museum, September 11, 2021. Photo by John Griswold. When 9-11 happened I was teaching at the University of Illinois. My wife was six weeks pregnant with our first son. We were getting ready for work but stopped to…
The Unpleasantness of Travel Now
Photo by John Griswold Start with small seats on the aircraft, smaller all the time, it seems, and the expectation that flights will be full, and no room in the overhead bins, so your bag goes under the seat in front of you, and your feet get pinned…
Larry Elder’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Larry Elder, the Republican candidate in the California gubernatorial recall race, was chased from a homeless encampment yesterday, one of his campaign stops. The first question is, why would Elder, a conservative, fish for votes among the homeless. Any campaign operative would say that is…
Happy Birthday, Elvin Jones
In 1972 or 1973, when I was twenty years old and a college undergraduate, I interviewed Elvin Jones at a Philly jazz club. I cannot remember which one, but I know it was not the Aqua Lounge or Just Jazz. It was not on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus either, where jazz groups sometimes played. What I remember was that I had to finagle to get in without paying.
Twenty Years After 9/11: History Repeats Itself
For years we have heard the country’s name repeated as a hotbed of problems, but conflict in Afghanistan exists on two levels: disputes among its own ethnic groups, some of which are Sunni and some Shia, and comic-book-crude clashes between superpowers, zapping each other like Godzilla and King Kong above the mountain peaks.
Vermeer’s Cupid Has Been Set Free
When I was single and grumbling about it, my mother used to say, “All it takes is a day.” One shift of the kaleidoscope, one chance meeting, and bitter loneliness drops away and the world glows with promise. That fast, your life has a different direction, a different set of possibilities.This is how it must have felt, though in a very different context, for the conservators who first X-rayed Johannes Vermeer’s quiet painting, "Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window."