Wife-carrying leaves me with mixed emotions. It sounds prehistoric, conjuring images of flickering firelight and women slung over one shoulder, screaming. But carrying one’s new wife over a threshold? Something primal, locked deep inside me, still thrills to those images.
Sick to my stomach at the naivete that kept me besotted with horse-drawn carriages and blind to the risks of anachronism, I look up the Animal Welfare Act and see to my relief that it protects horses. Then I realize I am looking at the Animal Welfare Act in the UK.
Photos by John Griswold
As it rounded a corner in a parking lot at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, the Dymaxion Car made a nostalgic sound, throaty and hardworking. Its engine, a 1933 Ford Flathead V-8, has been described as one of the 10 best engines of the…
Tuskegee Institute Nurse Eunice Rivers Laurie. (Courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration Southeast Region Records of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention)
Eunice Verdell Rivers was born on November 12, 1899, in Jakin, Georgia. She was best known as “Nurse Rivers” during her…
On this Veterans’ Day, Shirley Graham Du Bois might be remembered in her own right as a veteran of some important battles in a long war.
Photo courtesy Missouri History Museum
All kids are tuned to difference, since it means survival. But when you grow up poor you become acutely aware that some people have the means to change things, even in small ways, but do not. Discouraged by the enormity of the problem,…
Daniel Berrigan first met Dorothy Day during his Jesuit formation in the early ’50s, bringing his Brooklyn Prep students to her place near the Bowery. “It was life-changing for all of us,” he remembered. In 1961 Day attended a talk of Berrigan’s on Catholic social teaching and the influence of John XXIII. “Just like a priest!” she snapped afterward, leaving no time for others to discuss, but the next day she requested a copy of his talk for possible publication.
It is impossible to draw a direct causal link from November 1989 to all that came in its wake, but by making the unthinkable thinkable, the fall of the Berlin Wall set off a much larger cascade of events.
On the anniversary of his departure, a tip of the hat to Uncle Norman, whose latter-day appeal to the contemporary MAGA crowd ought not be held against him.
Screenshot from the trailer for ‘No Time to Die,’ from MGM and Eon Productions
What do I get for predicting that James Bond would still be looking over his shoulder in retirement, and despite his heroic adventures would feel only fatigue and purposelessness? None of that was…