Everyday Olympics
The Paris Olympics tell the human story: ambition, aspiration, discipline, hard work, luck, serendipity, glory, limelight, and then the biggest dream of all, and with a half-inch miss, catastrophe.
By Jeannette Cooperman
Patty Hearst and the Myth of Fingerprints
Patty Hearst was a rich man’s lost daughter, a damsel tied to the railroad tracks. Two months later, she was Helen of Troy. For young people, she became a transgressive idol, a young woman with the courage to break away from privilege and propriety. For nervous parents, she was a warning siren. For the FBI, she was a likely traitor and a pain in the ass. This was the nation’s first political kidnapping, and the simultaneous celebrity and nonentity, radical symbolism and girlish innocence, fascinated people.
Only Good People Can Be True Friends
Friends are trampolines, waiting to bounce you back up if you fall from the heights. With a real friend, Cicero says, “you are strong even when you are weak.”
Breaking Joins the Olympics—a St. Louis BBoy’s Take
Olympic judges, take note: the stylistic elements in breaking are what give a person room to be innovative, and that is where the creativity lives. So does the musicality, at which which St. Louis bboys (and the handful of bgirls) excel.
A Raised Fist Can Pack a Punch
Try to imagine Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, or either of the George Bushes making a clenched fist their symbol. You cannot.
The Photography of Gaucha Berlin
Gaucha Berlin's photography is more than beautiful. It is gentle and honest and shows you the tiniest bits of beauty on the planet in ways you have never troubled to see them.
Can You Diagram That Sentence?
“I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences,” announced the formidable Gertrude Stein, though her own sentences would defy the art.
The Purpose of Your Life Is to Change How Others Feel
“It is so hard to make someone else feel anything other than pain,” Nilay Patel remarked.“Christ,” Ezra Klein exclaimed. “That’s the darkest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
Forecasters, Make the Weather Personal
We have all figured out what supercells, the dew point, and a wintry mix are, we have made our peace with El Niño, and La Niña, and we have flat-out given up trying to understand Arctic oscillations. Give us forecasts that tie what is inside us to what is around us.
Tell Those Angels to Stop Dancing!
Aquinas thought women easily corrupted: “When a soul is vehemently moved to wickedness, as occurs mostly in little old women…” He had paved the way for witch-burning. Plus he spent an awfully long time figuring out how male and female demons had sex.
Why We Have the Strange Notion That It Is Good if We Endure Forever
Everybody wanted a piece of Sister Wilhelmina. Not a relic; those days are over. But they wanted to touch her, know her, maybe leave with a CD of the sisters’ music or a copy of the biography that was hastily whipped up. Even people who held religion at arm’s length read the national news stories, hungry for awe. And who does not need a miracle?
Invent a New Kind of Femininity
“Thinking about what aging means for the trans child,” Miranda July jotted in a writing notebook. “…. And how the physical changes of middle age/old age out anyone who is living as more feminine than they were born.”