Anatomical Specimens Share a Scone
Wanting answers, we create reductions: I am. She was. The administration will.
Sacha Mardou
Illustrator and artist Sacha Mardou resides in St. Louis, Missouri, and is author of the Ignatz-nominated series Sky in Stereo.
By Sacha Mardou
In Small-Town Indiana, LAM Runs a Lost and Found for the Forgotten Among Us
If you have ever cared for an addict, you know the desperate feeling of no easy solutions. Science has no inoculation or cure, so treatment is a combination of lengthy and often expensive behavioral and pharmacologic therapies that still depend on “the individual’s desire to change,” as LAM puts it.
Giant City and the Emotions Attached to a Home Biome
How do we get a home biome? By breathing the petrichor, I suppose, breaking out from poison ivy year after year, tasting the dirt and water on our lips, scraping our skin on scrambles, getting local minerals and bacteria in our bloodstream, leaving our sweat on the rocks. Maybe the cells we leave, and what we take with us, give us quantum pairing with these places.
Of Living Alone
Of course, living alone has few rules—one of its upsides usually—and nobody said you have to be that quiet.
Lucky Prescience in One Battle After Another
Paul Thomas Anderson’s films always have dark humor, but I have to think he may have felt a greater need to signal satire back then, which plays a little unevenly now.
Found Objects: Myself
I looked and looked. It was like looking at another part of myself.
The Unmoving Grasshopper and the Oddball Friends Who Say “I Love You”
Why is it only certain characters among my friends—the recovered addict who got rich off disaster services, the photographer who did federal time on a RICO conviction, the former scout and paratrooper with traumatic brain injury—tell me they love me? My polite friends, the “normal” ones, the ones with long, seemingly solid marriages and steady white-collar jobs and no priors, do not say such things, despite often having been in my life longer or more directly.
Tiptoeing Around Our Stories
In the best of times it is impossible to know other people fully. Even if we wish to act in good faith, it is hard to express to others who we think we are—and we may not know who we are.
Update from the Shawnee National Forest
It is a redundancy to say heroism must be shown in inopportune times. The current administration recently put 59 million acres of national forestland at greater risk in an opening salvo of a commodity-mindset war against the environment.
Billy Joel Documentary Like a Good Novel
One of the reasons I like the term “novelistic” for these sorts of documentaries is that it stresses how they deal in the mysteries of creation, its meaning, and its emotion. Joel has a song from 1977 called “Vienna,” with the refrain, “When will you realize / Vienna waits for you.”
A Real Knowhere Man, Part Two
I was used to my makeup and costume, but the one-inch heels, painful toes, and tight uppers of my tanker boots made me walk suspiciously, like a poor guy with a belly full of free eggs and a heart filled with larceny. My overall straps hung down in back like I had forgotten to fasten them after a trip to the outhouse. Yet the staff treated me and everyone else with cheerful professionalism. They knew how to handle an army of amateurs and loose cannons and get the job done.