The Glue That Holds Us Together
Elmer’s glue had to be smeared all over one’s finger, the inside of the wrist, or possibly the whole hand, then allowed to dry—blowing on it was permitted—and slowly, deliciously, peeled off.
By Jeannette Cooperman
Roses in an Alley
Was my cheerful trespass neighborly, an act of communal solidarity, or a brazen crime? Our jurisprudence gauges severity by dollar value, but what is the worth of a half-dead rose in an alley?
Shakespeare’s Sisters Speak Up
In Shakespeare’s Sisters: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, Ramie Targoff points out that when Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own, “she knew almost nothing about the powerful literary works a small group of women had written—and in many cases, published—around the time of Shakespeare.”
To See, or Not to See
Michael Eastman wants to walk around my little Southern Illinois town with his camera. A photographer whose work is in museums, who has shot the world’s extremes of beauty and decay, wants to walk around Waterloo, Illinois, and shoot? What the hell do I show him?
Why Bing Crosby Still Matters in American Memory
He had flawless musical timing, comic timing, cultural timing. When he fell out of time, we sped away from him. We still say Satchmo’s name, Ella’s, Sinatra’s, Elvis’s, with reverence. But only a smattering of fans and jazz musicians invoke “Bing Crosby” with similar awe.
We Are Losing Our Words
We corkscrew downward, using the nation’s declining literacy as a reason to degrade the quality of reading material, which then further constrains our vocabularies and decreases our literacy….
What We Lose When We Stop Writing Letters
Whatever winds up documenting modern lives holds nothing like Henry VIII’s love letter to Anne Boleyn, signed, “written with the hand of him who wishes he were yours.” Our martyred heroes will not send letters from Birmingham or any other jail. Contemporary epistolary novels will be a rally of terse texts.
Diogenes Can Teach You How to Say No
To the Cynics, the goal of life was, in literal translation, freedom from smoke—meaning false beliefs, pretense, and shallow lures.
A Cicada Left This Letter
Our corpses enrich your gardens, aerate your lawns, and plump your birds. Yet you see cicadas as a plague and a punishment?
Taste Used to Be Cultivated; Now It Is Led
Our tastes are being changed for us, homogenized by algorithms that force clicks of approval into spirals of popularity.
Famous Last Words
Elizabeth Barrett Browning exclaimed only, “Beautiful!” Martin Luther relaxed into amiability and said only “Yes.” Truman Capote—and this revelation breaks my heart—kept repeating “Mama.”
We Judge Even Animals by the Color of Their Skin
The pattern of our favor indicates that the substance in question is not “race” at all, but a clump of biomolecules called melanin. Swayed by ancient symbols and contemporary prejudices, we, supposedly the creatures of reason, react powerfully to the black-and-white extremes.