Searching for Debussy’s Cathedral, Behind the Wheel
Sitting in my idle rental car at various stoplights in rural Michigan, I felt the transcendent parallel fifths of Claude Debussy’s “La cathedral engloutie” wash over my ears all over again.
By Ben Fulton
The Heartland Student Journalism Fellowship Announces Second-Year Recipients for 2024
Washington University in St. Louis undergraduate student Alethea Franklin and St. Louis writer Marie Wenya Burns are the second annual recipients of the Heartland Journalism Fellowships.
The Conspiracy of Bad Coffee Is Real, but Ending Soon
(Jakub Dziubak via Unsplash) Every so often the forces of new scientific findings and opinion columns align to produce a certain sense of dread and unease. In this case, that dread and that unease are acute if you believe in the power and pleasure of a…
Daniel Kahneman Set the World Right by Showing How We Get It All Wrong
Thinking, Fast and Slow is, in part, an extended lesson in humility. It should humble us all to understand how limited we are. Kahneman’s book is also, fortunately for us, a potent antidote.
The Lost Joys of Flying a Kite
Flying a kite is the simple pleasure of celebrating, in the quietest but most glorious way, winter folding into spring.
Listening to Mussorgsky’s “Great Gate of Kyiv” during the Ukraine War
Mussorgsky’s music represents a tsarist, imperial vision of what Hartmann, and no doubt other Russians, wanted to see constructed so that it could adorn the capital city of Ukraine for generations. When we listen to Mussorgsky’s music we can instead, for now, call to mind the Golden Gate of Kiev that still stands.
Why the Trial over the Eagles’ Lyrics Epitomizes Boomer Rot
Ever since it was filed in 2022 this was a case shoved into the headlines by boring egos, sloppy legal work, and with the anemic celebrity appeal of America’s most blasé, greedy 1970s rock band lounging sleazily at the center of it all.
Five Years Since Scott Walker’s Gone
The story of Scott Walker is the story not of making it big, but making it big the right way across an entire career, including even the long breaks in between.
Robert Motherwell’s Defining Images of Change and Strife
It is in Motherwell’s complete and utter lack of direct representation that we might find room to discover the heart of his “Elegies.” He assumes, graciously, that we also have the heart and intelligence to triangulate history, painted images, and varying titles on the theme of Spain’s self-inflicted suffering.
Marriage is an Institution for the Rich
While most proponents of marriage frame the problem correctly—as if it was not already obvious that married people are less likely to be lonely—they grab this thorny dilemma by the wrong end of the stick.
Anselm Kiefer’s Appetite for Destruction
Humor in the face of depictions as seemingly bleak as Kiefer’s is not far off the mark. There is no punch-line in “Burning Rods.“ Look carefully enough, though, and it is clear there is no distinct vanishing point, either.
Watching Rashomon in the Age of Disinformation
The flip side of Kurosawa’s great film, revealing a murder mystery to solve, is also a world in which the search for truth, however difficult or naïve, must never be abandoned.