IFC Films has released a new documentary on Kurt Vonnegut, co-directed by Robert Weide, who in the process of filming Vonnegut over decades created a close relationship with the writer. The film traces this connection, even as it shows Weide’s failure to make his original conception of the documentary—for 40 years.
Balzac, who married only late in life, is unclear whether a husband or a wife would need to be an almost-genius to create a good husband. Maybe by genius he meant the attendant spirit of a couple working together to make something, which after all is a chief value in marriage.
Photos by John Griswold
As it rounded a corner in a parking lot at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, the Dymaxion Car made a nostalgic sound, throaty and hardworking. Its engine, a 1933 Ford Flathead V-8, has been described as one of the 10 best engines of the…
Photo courtesy Missouri History Museum
All kids are tuned to difference, since it means survival. But when you grow up poor you become acutely aware that some people have the means to change things, even in small ways, but do not. Discouraged by the enormity of the problem,…
Screenshot from the trailer for ‘No Time to Die,’ from MGM and Eon Productions
What do I get for predicting that James Bond would still be looking over his shoulder in retirement, and despite his heroic adventures would feel only fatigue and purposelessness? None of that was…
Flight deck of ‘USS Okinawa’ during the evacuation of Saigon, April 1975. Courtesy U.S. Marine Corps History website
I am not in the habit of writing paeans to war machines, but the prototype of the UH-1 Huey helicopter flew for the first time 65 years ago this month,…
Cartoonist and writer Bill Mauldin. Courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-127496
The Oath Keepers, a militia group, is (still) in the news, as the Department of Justice and the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol continue…
The wreck of the ‘USS Inaugural,’ October 21, 2021
Every few years the Mississippi at St. Louis drops enough to reveal the wreck of a WWII minesweeper, the USS Inaugural, lying in a few feet of water, next to the Missouri shore. How it came to be there…
Photo by John Griswold
Of course a city garbage truck—big, dangerous, smelly—was the big hit at the local Touch a Truck event today, and both kids and parents enthused over it. My younger son had volunteered to help staff the event, and it was one of our first…
Photo by John Griswold
“How far, in any case, must one go back
to find the beginning?”
—WG Sebald, After Nature
I know someone who used to say, at key life-moments: I’m going to just [do this one thing], and we’ll see what happens. If you looked…
Photo of an exhibit in the museum, by John Griswold
Ms. Charlotte Davis wanted to show me everything.
I was standing on the porch of the log cabin next to the museum, and when I turned she had appeared on the steps, an older local lady with tight…
A crowd of thousands at City Hall in Houston. Photo by John Griswold
A would-be participant in the Houston Women’s March for reproductive and voting rights stood in a line of three dozen people waiting to pay to park on Saturday morning, in a lot next to Minute…