Slow the Roll
As he tooled along, his car turned over 100,000 miles. He was a guy who had a car with a 100,000 miles on it. He had a lot of miles on him too. He wondered how many that would be, briefly tried to do the math.
By John Griswold
The Mosquitoes of Winter
Thank goodness for the Christmas tree, bringer of joy and emotional warmth, driven down on a truck from Mississippi or North Carolina. Its tiny lights and ornaments collected for decades infuse the subtropical house with seasonal cheer, even if you can see the warm, wet road and piles of hurricane debris past it through the windows.
After the Hurricanes, the Holidays
The Capital One tower in Lake Charles, Louisiana, still missing most of its glass after the hurricanes. It is 72 degrees and raining again in Lake Charles. It has been raining off and on for days. There is an ongoing mosquito infestation, despite two US Air Force…
The Recipe in the Writing Class
Never pin your financial hopes on a legume. Ham and beans is really about making use of what one already has at hand, driving one’s own good luck by not wasting opportunities, such as a few handfuls of hard beans and the inedible shank of a pig left over from Christmas dinner.
Pathetic ‘Mischief’: 3 Figures of the Alt-Right
Richard Spencer at his mother’s house in Whitefish, Montana, in a scene from ‘White Noise.’ The Atlantic’s first documentary, White Noise, is directed by Daniel Lombroso, who also did the camera work. It was Lombroso who captured the images in 2016 of white nationalist Richard Spencer (“a…
Love and Stuff, an Auto-Documentary
Photo courtesy of MPRM Communications. Judith Helfand’s newest film, Love and Stuff, puts the past in conversation with the present, and the results are moving. Helfand is known for socially-engaged films such as Blue Vinyl, an Emmy-nominated documentary about health risks from the PVC industry, and Cooked: Survival…
New Film on Wuhan at the Start of Pandemic
A screenshot from the new documentary ’76 Days.’ A new documentary shows some of what those in Wuhan, China, faced in the early days of the pandemic. 76 Days , funded in part by the Sundance Institute and the Ford Foundation, is being distributed by MTV Documentary Films.
Swimming to Cambodia at Thirty-Five
Spalding Gray’s images of immersion, of sharks in a swimming pool, of drowning fears, of being a child rocked to sleep by the sea, of being a “pumpkin-headed perceiver” among waves hiding the shore, seem all too meaningful now.
John O’Brien in Action
John O’Brien, the head of the much-admired Dalkey Archive Press, has died. Here is a piece I wrote in December 2009, after a visit to the Press, when it was located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. O’Brien was in his element. —JG …
More Gloop than Bucket, It Turns Out
As I wrote in September, my friend Charlie bought my kids and me a ticket for a Willy Wonka-ish contest. Promoter and businessman David Klein, who likes to be called The Candyman, is giving away a candy factory in Florida, and the winner will come from…
Nomad: Werner Herzog’s Tribute to Bruce Chatwin
A screenshot from ‘Nomad,’ distributed by Music Box Films. The film Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin was shown at Tribeca and Telluride, and on the BBC, in 2019, but it is just now available in the US, on several platforms. The film is a documentary on…
About Veterans Day
Imagine if some of us were in our cups—let’s say we had a day off and a backyard big enough to social-distance—and the topic turned to military service. I guarantee that long before we reached the dregs, veritas would come spilling out: We have very different ideas on what “service” means.