A still from ‘The Booksellers,’ distributed by Greenwich Entertainment. The documentary The Booksellers was set to release theatrically in 2020, but the pandemic hit, and it made its way to Amazon Prime. The film is a group portrait of lovesickness—the ecstasy, labor, and sometimes disappointment of the…
Criticize their politics all you like, the French know how to savor life. Foibles that create delicious little whirls of scandal and drama here, they dismiss with an amused shrug. They save their energy for protecting their culture, their language—and now, their roosters.
How did we become so averse, when mud was the stuff of creation? God scooped it up to sculpt himself a little Adam. In Jewish folklore, a golem is made the same way. A goddess made Gilgamesh a companion out of clay. The Egyptian god Khnum made children of the same stuff, then tucked them into their mother’s womb.
As it happens, modern nail polish was inspired by the tough, glossy lacquer sprayed on cars. And the first nail polish was worn by men—Babylonian warriors were painting their nails green and black in 3200 BCE. Given the human propensity to find violence sexy, I suppose it was natural that women would eventually follow suit.
Theodore Dreiser, courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (CC0) One of the literary figures whose association with St. Louis has been mostly forgotten is Theodore Dreiser, author of the novels Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. Dreiser lived and worked in St. Louis for 16 formative months, from November…
The threat is apocalyptic and terrifying, and then humanity is saved by triumphant scientists. Rather than think about nature as indifferent to us, we need to imagine an enemy. Rather than focus on public health and social inequity, we need an epic battle. Social justice does not play on the big screen or the small one.
Work done by Eileen Mayberry, at the ‘Find A Grave’ site. The website Find A Grave was started in 1995 by a man named Jim Tipton, as an amateur tribute site for celebrity graves. It became a commercial site in 1998 and began posting photos, submitted by…
Classics is hot—and not in a good way. Earlier this month, a leading historian of Rome, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, was featured in The New York Times Magazine accusing classicists of helping to invent the very construct of “Whiteness”—that slippery idea that means so much less than it seems to—and thus bolstering White supremacism. Even the phrase “Western civilization” is code, he says, because it implies that the only civilization that matters is White with Greco-Roman roots.
(Photo by Felix Montino via Flickr) We are all going a wee bit crazy, and the latest remedy for social isolation is something called tulpamancy. The art of the invisible friend. Tulpamancy is defined as “the act of conjuring sentient beings,” dreaming up a person who will live…
When I see someone whose body is twisted into an unfamiliar shape or cannot move as mine does, I often flinch, then try to hide the involuntary recoil. Afterward, I lie to myself, insisting that this is empathy. It is not. It is stark fear. Why? Because I am not sure I would have the same resilience. There is also a tinge of survivor’s guilt—I escaped their fate on what grounds, exactly?