“Everything changed the day she figured out there was exactly enough time for the important things in her life.” -Brian Andreas Almost everyone who spies a mother with young children will remind her “to enjoy them while they are little; it goes by so fast.” Maybe fathers get this unsolicited advice, too, though my daughter’s […]
The emergency ladder is not noticeable unless one squints at the side of the whitewashed farmhouse. The ladder is a series of two-by-fours, painted white and spaced and nailed just so onto the siding, to form an almost indiscernible ladder leading up to a second-story attic bedroom. The girl who lives in this bedroom is […]
Title after Paul Claudel’s “Heat of the Sun” We observe how climate change continues to prompt extreme weather events around the world. We take note of sea-level changes reported by Boaty McBoatface, an autonomous British yellow submarine which just returned from its maiden voyage to the Southern Ocean near Antarctica. So, now might be as […]
Good writing, like any craft or art, convinces us of its inevitability. “It’s like all your sentences always existed, just waiting around in Style Heaven, or wherever, for you to fetch them down,” the admiring student in Wonder Boys says. Maybe the better word is intentionality: the confidence that a work (novel, painting, song, poem) […]
Is there anything as sweet as a city and its Cinderella hockey team the day after winning the Stanley Cup for the first time? As I drive down a major thoroughfare, driver after driver honks at fans decked out in yellow and blue; these particular fans are lined up outside an Irish pub at 10 […]
The title of Thomas Wolfe’s 1940 posthumous novel came from the Australian-British journalist and writer Ella Winter, who asked Wolfe once, “Don’t you know you can’t go home again?” And while Winter and Wolfe are right, you cannot go home again, at least not the home you remembered as a child or a teenager, you […]
Rob Connoley, who owns Bulrush STL, was foraging near I-170 this morning with three of his staff. Bulrush is the newly-opened restaurant in St. Louis with “contemporary interpretations of historic (1820-1870) Ozark cuisine.” “Everything is made from scratch, every single day,” Rob said as he picked mulberries from a tree on the grounds of Pinnacle […]
The St. Louis Science Center has an exhibit now called “Pompeii: The Exhibition,” with 150 artifacts on loan from the Naples National Archaeology Museum. “A volcano awakens, a city vanishes,” signs say. Visitors must look first at artifacts of everyday life in Pompeii, then stand through a short CGI movie of Vesuvius’ eruption in 79 […]
Some have argued that channel surfing is dead, much like doorbells since many of us simply text “here” once we arrive. While the latter development is yet another casualty of technology marching on and our collective avoidance of unexpected visitors, television has become a serious art form–one that captivates and absorbs our imaginations, conversations, and […]
“Tim” went to a table read last week for a new episode of the Simpsons, on the Fox Studios lot in Los Angeles. The series is in its historic 30th season, and the episode would not air for a year. He got tickets because a visiting friend knew someone who took a class with the […]
