Dr. Timothy Snyder, an American professor of history at Yale, has been much in the news for deciding as “a scholar of fascism” to (variously) “flee,” “escape,” or “depart” the United States for Canada as “a prominent critic…of President Donald Trump.” That certainly sounds bad for the rest of us. In truth […]
Before the president of the United States began publicly musing about developing the Gaza Strip into a hip resort town, a sort of Las Vegas in the Middle East, I could claim only one small gift of second sight. I was driving west on Highway 40 in St. Louis one day in […]
Last week, I was on a panel. This, for me, is the equivalent of a tax audit, triggering raw, unwarranted terror. I did my usual stupid thing: wrote out all my answers to the posed questions and tried to memorize them. Then the organizer encouraged us to ad lib, go off script, […]
I came of age walking around Northwest Plaza, a then-novel “outdoor mall” with a pebbly version of cobblestones and several courtyard fountains so hypnotic I had their shapes memorized. By “came of age,” I mean that I became a person who made her own choices. Not the early Montessori choices my mom cribbed […]
Finally, I was honest. Forty years of trying not to be, and all it took was a glass of wine and friends I hoped would understand. They were asking what I thought of the new building fondly known as The Cheese Grater, aka The Pineapple. Our host had written a warm letter of […]
A loud curse from upstairs, vibrating the air like a tolled bell. The dog looks at me, alarmed. “Oh, don’t worry,” I say. “That’s just Daddy.” Punching a hole through his cuff buttonhole with a pen because it is Monday morning, he is about to be late to teach a class, and everyday […]
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 […]