Fifty Songs Featuring Cities and Urban Life
A listicle about popular music and the metropolis.
By Gerald Early
January 31, 2022
More by Gerald Early
Baseball, Battlefields, and the Beginnings of Cold War America
In “Warm Summers and Cold Winters,” Steven P. Gietschier tells the story of Charley and Bill DeWitt, owners of the perennial American League losers, the St. Louis Browns, who, in 1950, decided to hire a psychologist and hypnotist named Dr. David Tracy to help some of the players get over their “inferiority complex.”
The Making of a Black Role Model
I am the same age as Jayne Kennedy, and her memoir does a wonderful job of recreating how exciting a time it was if—to paraphrase singer and pianist Nina Simone—one were young, ambitious, and Black.
Once Every Seventeen Years
The game here took place on several dimensions. It was, on one hand, a game with time—in the right place at the right moment—and on the other, with fish and bugs, in that moment. Once every seventeen years, maybe this might happen. But it has also become a game with memory, and with writing—and now, with technology.
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Untitled Pictures in an Exhibition
The untitled photograph is not merely a breach between memory and hope, but rather an invitation to inhabit that breach from a distance.
Journey to the Crossroads of America and the Hope of Obama Land
Can this controversial, privately funded $850 million center—dismissed by many as a vanity project, architectural folly, and dangerous precedent—really shore up democracy?
Remembering Richard Wright, Outsider
Richard Wright has in common with Thomas Hardy that the plots in his fiction are sometimes intricate to the point of distraction, and the events he depicts are often sensational, sometimes to a fault. His novels published after “Native Son” have much to recommend them. Still, “Native Son” and “Black Boy” stand as his most enduring achievements. They capture the isolation from mainstream society that is the reality of many young Black people, in the time of Wright’s youth and in our time.