“Hot damn, mummies!” I heard someone say at the St. Louis Science Center, which is currently hosting the exhibit Mummies of the World. Who is not drawn to gaze on a mummy, even at $19.95 a ticket? Usually I think of mummies as “ceremonially preserved,” but this exhibit takes the more accurate, broader […]
“That’s the problem with Midwesterners!” explodes my intensely creative, less than patient friend. “They think nice is a thing. Nice is just passive-aggressive.” Wait—nice is not a thing? Not a virtue to which we must aspire? Not the sweet lubricant that allows us to function in community? That would be […]
An artist held out drawings of the rock art in Picture Cave. In its pitch-black depths, beneath a woodsy, remote part of Warren County, Missouri, the cave had walls covered in red and black pictographs. Carol Diaz-Granados, who was working on a doctoral dissertation about Missouri’s American Indian rock art, stared for a […]
I tried a few light mentions, name-checking her with the diffidence I reserve for any opinion that might be dorkier than I realize. “Who?” “Oh, yeah. Never watched that.” Crushed, I shut up. Nobody was going to share a grown woman’s sudden, overwhelming love for a long-ago teenage tv show that felt like […]
According to Instagram, Facebook, and several other platforms, the sight of a woman’s nipples is potentially offensive, too sexually charged for the general public. The exceptions to that rule are interesting. When a woman’s nipple has been injured, scarred, or rebuilt after a mastectomy, it can be shown. When a woman’s nipple is […]
Comedian-musician Bo Burnham has a song in his most recent Netflix special, Inside, that admits he is “problematic.” In making a joke of something true, he either faces it or is trying to get ahead of criticism (or both), depending on the viewing. Burnham has been performing online since he was 16 years […]
Dried veggies, small scoop. Red beans, big scoop. Vitamin powder, medium scoop. Rice, big scoop. Dried veggies. . . . People poured into Chaminade’s gym this morning, squinting as they tried to find friends camouflaged by hairnets and masks. Now we are getting to work, filling and sealing bags of food that will […]
I can wail for hours about what we lost when we stopped writing letters by hand, letting our hearts and minds flow through our bodies and onto heavy cream paper that could be kept, smoothed, wept on, reread until it crumbled with age. But the most I’ve put on paper to my husband […]
The Illinois State Fair was canceled in 2020, for the pandemic, and for years before that I was living elsewhere. As we walked across the Fairgrounds yesterday to meet the rest of our family, my younger son asked if I knew where I was going. Of course I did. When I was a […]
“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” Simone Weil said that. Weil, whom Andre Gide called the patron saint of all outsiders. She was a leftist who alarmed her comrades by embracing religion. A French secular Jew who became a devout […]
