“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.
When I was single and grumbling about it, my mother used to say, “All it takes is a day.” One shift of the kaleidoscope, one chance meeting, and bitter loneliness drops away and the world glows with promise. That fast, your life has a different direction, a different set of possibilities.This is how it must have felt, though in a very different context, for the conservators who first X-rayed Johannes Vermeer’s quiet painting, "Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window."
The rich are different from you and me, as Fitzgerald said; they have bigger toys. Sometimes the toys draw so much water, and provide such a temptation to the unwashed masses, that they require deep-water berthing at their own islands built offshore.
Dragonflies’ names tell the story: black darter, blue dasher, brown hawker, green darner, wandering glider, widow skimmer, four-spotted chaser. What would it feel like to fly that free?
Photo by John Griswold
We have an old bottle of Macallan whisky given to us by my in-laws, who were Scottish immigrants in the 1950s. They told us that a family friend was a foreman at the Macallan distillery, and he gifted them the bottle on the eve…
The stamps do not lie: Their colors pop out of a solemn black background, and the skulls evoke grief, death, and decomposition as surely as poor Yorick’s skull did for Hamlet. But there is no sense of alas, no horror or repulsion. These are sugar skulls, delightful to take into ourselves.