Pete Hegseth, the United States’ new secretary of defense, was still in elementary school when the Soviet Union crumbled. Unlike people born after 1991, he must have some memory of the Cold War and the demonization of Russians by the American government, especially our military. But when he graduated from Princeton […]
Ukrainian-American poet Oksana Maksymchuk was in town the last couple of days as a guest of WashU’s International Writers Series and on tour for her new English-language collection, Still City (November 2024, Pitt Poetry Series). She has previously published two collections in Ukrainian. Maksymchuk is also a scholar and literary translator; she […]
Oh, hell, the recipe calls for a can of tomatoes. No worries, there’s one in the basement. I’ll just go down and—wait, I should bring up the dog treats while I—there’s that tax folder. Better move it so I remember to file this year’s backup and—did I get Andrew to sign that form? […]
“A cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” Oscar Wilde taught us. But in our current crisis of egg prices, have we learned anything? Chickens and eggs have been on the menu of civilizations worldwide so long they have transcended their long-held status of dietary […]
“Everything is connected,” we often remind one another, nodding wisely—but with no idea of the implications. Not until the end of the twentieth century did we realize that the immune system’s inflammatory response plays a central role in anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, MS and other auto-immune diseases, Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia, Parkinson’s, […]
I had not been to Plaza Frontenac in quite some time, except to scurry in the Saks end to see a movie without pop or popcorn. For some sad, unfathomable reason, they no longer make concessions. And neither do the stores. My mom and I used to go to Frontenac regularly, […]
Latent and overt violence at public sporting events is catnip for sociologists, who see competitive sports as violence condensed to a more manageable form. Historians are drawn to violence in sports as well, fascinated by its gradations—from life-or-death struggles in Roman coliseums and battlefields to docile, but no less ruthless, chess […]
The world knows Howard Nemerov as twice the U.S. Poet Laureate, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, a distinguished professor and poet-in-residence at Washington University for twenty-one years—and a bit of an enigma. A stylist impatient with literary pretension; a deep thinker who held up wit and irony […]
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. A simple idea, the core of Christianity and every other world religion. I remember parroting it as a kid. Later I realized it instilled equity—all human persons have the same value, and no one should be treated as somehow less than you. […]
Recently on a trip I picked up a copy of The Southern, the regional newspaper for Southern Illinois, where I grew up. The paper is physically smaller than it used to be, but the fact that it is still printed is remarkable. The Pew Research Center said, a couple of years ago, […]