Painting by Jean Walgens Pierre, age 12.
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…
Young people despise email, even at work. I picked up on this subtle fact when every source under thirty provided only a cell number—or demanded mine. Email is seen as too formal, too anxiety-producing, and one’s phone as more casual and friendly than one’s keyboard.
Trooper Haylie Polistina, from the Illinois State Police Public Information Office, at the Illinois State Fair. Photo by John Griswold
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…
Simone Weil might not have cherished a strong sense of place or family or chummy associations herself, but she understood solidarity—and she knew it was already eroding.
Artist’s diagram of the interior plan of the Hindenburg, 1936. Wikimedia Commons
Humans desire a “home,” distinguished from “a house” or other dwelling by emotional attachment.
Like the house, a home might have walls, a toilet, running water, a bed, the means to keep and cook food, some…
We already knew to call psilocybin the magic mushroom, because it brings visions of serenity and oneness. If other fungi help us rinse away the toxins and find our balance again, we will have to acknowledge their magic, too.
Chimpanzees have been bred for lab research, infected with HIV, sent into outer space. They are vulnerable to many of the same illnesses we are, including Alzheimer’s. They also experience many of the same emotions
You see it the minute you walk into the House of Miles: his eyes, glowing light, stare back at you from a huge black-and-white photo, the one where he wears a sleeveless shirt and has his arms raised, maybe after one of the boxing workouts that helped his breath control. He learned to box right here.
Screen capture from the Royalty Exchange website
Remember when Michael Jackson bought publishing rights to songs by The Beatles, Springsteen, Elvis, the Stones, and others? He did so, famously, after Paul McCartney, collaborator and once-friend, told him it was a good investment. Then Macca spent 35 years trying…
Photo by John Griswold
My friend Larry was complaining that his flight to Paris was several hours longer, now that he lived in Los Angeles instead of Chicago.
“That means I have to watch three or four more movies in-flight,” he said. He is an actor.
I had just…