Does Water Make St. Louis the City of the Future?
Wealth and technology have allowed development in regions of the country without adequate water, but when wealth and technology fail to sustain, we will be forced to pay greater attention.
By John Griswold
Bo Burnham’s Inside: Anything and Everything, All of the Time
A recent meme made by @aborteddreams “Welcome to whatever this is,” comedian Bo Burnham says, a few minutes into his new Netflix special. “It’s not gonna be a normal special, because there’s no audience and there’s no crew. It’s just me and my camera, and you and your…
Master Photographers’ Advice for All Creative People
Robert Capa and John Steinbeck, 1948, via Wikimedia Commons I received a link last week to a 60-page PDF booklet called “Wear Good Shoes: Advice from Magnum Photographers.” It is worth a look. Magnum is the photographers cooperative founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George…
Of Revision
Photo by artistmac, Wikimedia Commons. I had a piece to write, about the Mississippi. Flat shining basins, filled with river water made to slow its roll, lay on the other shore. I chose to write it because that stretch of river made me uneasy. Facing it, you know.
Lake Charles, Again
“Here we are in Lake Charles, feeling like we are living out the book of Job in the Bible,” a Facebook friend wrote this week. “God has smitten us again.” “Who else is tired of Survivor Lake Charles?” someone else wrote. After a year with two hurricanes…
The Boiling Age
Photo by Michal Balog on Unsplash There often has been a sense of respite in quarantine for some of us lucky enough to have remote jobs and children who get along in tight quarters. The period leading to Covid was rough, too, after all, and my self-assignments to see…
Good Trouble
Photo by John Griswold A “votercade” was held in St. Louis on Saturday, in support of the National John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Action Day. The national event was to “to demand preservation and expansion of voting rights,” by “mobilizing to pass the For the People Act,…
The New Prosperity Gospel
Photo by Craig McLachlan on Unsplash Followers of the prosperity gospel worship the power of positive thinking—above all, the puritan faith that they are preordained for prosperity—and are comically impious as a result. “Expect great things and great things will come,” said Norman Vincent Peale, friend and counselor…
When Failure is the Measure of Success
Still from Navy Video by Mass Communications Specialist 1st Class Patrick Enright/Released When I was training to be a military diver, the school’s cadre often ran us out to the beach to run in formation through the loose sand of the dunes, because it was said to be…
“Are the Important Things Something Else Entirely?”
Jenny Erpenbeck, born in East Berlin, is an award-winning German novelist, short story writer, playwright, and opera director. Not a Novel is her first full-sized nonfiction collection, translated in 2020 by Kurt Beals, a professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis.
Markers of the Past
Photo by John Griswold The Union Miners’ Cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois, was quiet on a recent Thursday afternoon. It sits a quarter-mile south of one of the remaining stretches of old Route 66, in a town of two thousand. The cemetery is filled with German, Italian, and Eastern…
All the Money in the World
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels Say a universal income was instituted, or you won the lottery, or were lucky enough to find a job that paid you to do what you enjoyed. What would you do if all your basic financial needs were met? My mom used…