Southern Illinois was my first biome, and I still know it intimately, but summers can be miserably humid and hot. Before every major thunderstorm, people in the St. Louis area keep saying this will be the one to break the heat for the year, but today it was in the 90s with 83 percent humidity.
In honor of Claude McKay’s birthday, here are two rarely republished sonnets from his 1922 collection "Harlem Shadows," the Harlem Renaissance’s earliest book of poetry.
Who controls the corporations who control our news? A helpful index was just compiled—not by mainstream media, but by Harvard researchers exploring media’s future. Skimming the list, I see two names again and again: BlackRock Fund Advisors and Vanguard Group.
The world gets blown up so often these days that everyone has gotten used to it. Leon Spinks’s nervous system was not what it used to be, and neither was anyone else’s.
What makes the difference here? White man versus Black female? A harsh prosecutor, in Owens’s case, at a time with little oversight of the legal system? We will likely never know. But there is so much talk about inequity and injustice that it sometimes washes over me. Seeing the particulars unfold is a lot more painful.
“Flags of Valor,” a memorial outside the St. Louis Art Museum, September 11, 2021. Photo by John Griswold. When 9-11 happened I was teaching at the University of Illinois. My wife was six weeks pregnant with our first son. We were getting ready for work but stopped to…
Photo by John Griswold Start with small seats on the aircraft, smaller all the time, it seems, and the expectation that flights will be full, and no room in the overhead bins, so your bag goes under the seat in front of you, and your feet get pinned…
Larry Elder, the Republican candidate in the California gubernatorial recall race, was chased from a homeless encampment yesterday, one of his campaign stops. The first question is, why would Elder, a conservative, fish for votes among the homeless. Any campaign operative would say that is…
In 1972 or 1973, when I was twenty years old and a college undergraduate, I interviewed Elvin Jones at a Philly jazz club. I cannot remember which one, but I know it was not the Aqua Lounge or Just Jazz. It was not on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus either, where jazz groups sometimes played. What I remember was that I had to finagle to get in without paying.
For years we have heard the country’s name repeated as a hotbed of problems, but conflict in Afghanistan exists on two levels: disputes among its own ethnic groups, some of which are Sunni and some Shia, and comic-book-crude clashes between superpowers, zapping each other like Godzilla and King Kong above the mountain peaks.