Born 1940 in Los Angeles, Roy Ayers never orbited the approximate longitude of the Mississippi Delta, Memphis, and Detroit that formed the connecting lines between Black gospel music, blues, and soul and rhythm and blues that would merge in Detroit to form the cultural phenomenon of Motown. A true fan might […]
After fussing with his back leg, the dog turned to look at me, eyes wide with panic. I bent to check and found a bright yellow plastic fish with four wicked-sharp hooks dangling, three of them now hopelessly tangled in Willie’s coat. Somebody must have dropped it in the alley. I begged him […]
Elon Musk’s fourteenth child was born last month. The names of the previous thirteen are deliberately unusual words charged with personal significance for their papa. The fourteenth’s name is Seldon Lycurgus. Seldon, for Hari Seldon, a mathematician in Isaac Asimov’s science fiction Foundations series. First Minister of the Empire, he develops a new […]
Every political moment has its tropes. Our current political moment has at least two. The first, used to describe any dizzying scale of change across time, stems from a reminder by Mexican poet Homero Aridjis ) though it is commonly attributed to a paraphrase by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin): “There are decades where […]
Some online quizzes ask you to choose from a list of things you may have done at some point in your life. These are meant to make you feel brave (skydived), old-school knowledgeable (used a paper map and compass), or experienced (traveled outside the country). Each affirmative answer is a point, […]
Say you are learning English, and you are trying to figure out what “gut” means. Ah, a beer belly. But who would equate a beer belly with courage? Then your doctor talks about your gut, which is hardly distended, or brave; he seems to refer to coiled innards. Yet a bratty bully yells […]
A dreary spring day, cold and wet, is what I remember. And standing, nervous, at the edge of a scraggly “crowd” of about twelve people. We were in Saint Louis U.’s quad, and this was my first (and almost last) protest. Something about hostages in Iraq? God help me, I cannot remember. All […]
I screwed up my Facebook feed, on purpose, in 2016. It has never really recovered. Back then I was writing about the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota, where thousands of non-Native veterans from across the United States went to support the Lakota-Dakotas’ right not to have a massive pipeline cross the […]
Edvard Munch’s The Scream qualifies as an iconic image only for people who have never seen it. Its power to transfix, its ineluctable pull on the eye, is such that it qualifies as iconic before we even define the word. For everyone else who has seen it recycled and repurposed from The Simpsons […]
There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to hang out with people who are like you. There is nothing wrong with wanting to live near them, work with them, and party with them. The problems start when the similarity is a stark, flat-out category with a history of larger discrimination, and people try […]