The new documentary Becoming, released May 6, is the second film from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions, which signed with Netflix in 2018. Their first film (see my review here) was American Factory, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature last year.
American…
In keeping with my habit of wondering about people I never see or talk to (and may not know at all), I decided to see how some of them are doing in the crisis.
Bulrush, March 2020. Photo courtesy Rob Connoley.
In June of last year…
In keeping with my habit of wondering about people I never see or talk to (and may not know at all), I decided to see how some of them are doing in the crisis.
Standing Rock, December 2016. Photo by John Griswold.
LaDonna…
Nicholas Vreeland is what passes for American royalty. He is the grandson of Diana Vreeland, the famous Editor-in-Chief of Vogue, and related to George Washington and Francis Scott Key. His father, “Freck,” was a longtime CIA officer and diplomat, and Nicky, as his family calls him, was born in…
If the Fleeting World is but a long dream,
It does not matter whether one is young or old.
But ever since the day that my friend left my side
And has lived an exile in the City of Chiang-ling,
There is one wish…
I have been thinking about relative dangers, recently, since everything now seems like a calculus of risk. I also want to be able to give my children perspective, as their isolation continues, a graduation has been canceled, and their futures teeter. Those who have been shocked at the sudden…
Because my overseas tour in the army was in the Republic of Panama, I was pleased to find a book, after I got home, called The Isthmus of Panama, and What I Saw There (1852), by Chauncey D. Griswold (no known relation).
Chauncey Griswold was a surgeon for the…
The Herrin Massacre included the humiliation, wounding, and murder, by gun, rope, and knife, of unarmed men. Like the actions of any mob, it was irrational and grotesque, and there can be no defense of it. But there are better and lesser ways of telling stories. I have come to think of the massacre as an American tragedy, in which two old but opposed visions of our country were the seeds of conflict that may yet be our downfall.
Two-and-a-half hours north of St. Louis, in Quincy, Illinois, there is a private air force bigger than half the world’s combat air forces. In size, it ranks somewhere between South Africa’s and Mexico’s, and is growing (and hiring). The US military welcomes its existence.
Don Kirlin owns Air USA,…
With hoarding evident from empty shelves, and fears of food insecurity in the news, people are naturally thinking of previous, widespread shortages, as in the Depression and during WWII.
One recent Internet meme says, “Ya’ll are about to learn why your grandma hoarded frozen butter and washed her aluminum foil.”…
Even amidst the pandemic, historic unemployment, and the near-halt of our lives, many have worries about what will happen when isolation eases. Like the rumble of an avalanche yet to be seen, there are plenty of signs that economic problems are snowballing to hit later.
What will happen after a…
As Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson has pointed out, the sudden eruption of problems in Wisconsin elections this week has national importance, since it serves as warning for what could happen on the third of November. As she puts it, “It’s hard to imagine that the election of…