Dispatches

Tulpan a Beautiful Homage to the Steppe

A screenshot from ‘Tulpan,’ starring Askhat Kuchencherekov as Asa.   A stampede of camels groan in the red dust; a dog barks as it streaks past a yurt, in pursuit. This is the opening of Tulpan (2008), a Kazakh narrative film streaming now as part of Filmatique’s Foreign Language…

The Cock Will Crow

Criticize their politics all you like, the French know how to savor life. Foibles that create delicious little whirls of scandal and drama here, they dismiss with an amused shrug. They save their energy for protecting their culture, their language—and now, their roosters.

How Mud Can Save Us

How did we become so averse, when mud was the stuff of creation? God scooped it up to sculpt himself a little Adam. In Jewish folklore, a golem is made the same way. A goddess made Gilgamesh a companion out of clay. The Egyptian god Khnum made children of the same stuff, then tucked them into their mother’s womb.

Spitting on Polish

As it happens, modern nail polish was inspired by the tough, glossy lacquer sprayed on cars. And the first nail polish was worn by men—Babylonian warriors were painting their nails green and black in 3200 BCE. Given the human propensity to find violence sexy, I suppose it was natural that women would eventually follow suit.

Dreiser in St. Louis

Theodore Dreiser, courtesy of National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution (CC0) One of the literary figures whose association with St. Louis has been mostly forgotten is Theodore Dreiser, author of the novels Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. Dreiser lived and worked in St. Louis for 16 formative months, from November…

Loose Canon: Can Classics Survive the Neo-Nazis?

Classics is hot—and not in a good way. Earlier this month, a leading historian of Rome, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, was featured in The New York Times Magazine accusing classicists of helping to invent the very construct of “Whiteness”—that slippery idea that means so much less than it seems to—and thus bolstering White supremacism. Even the phrase “Western civilization” is code, he says, because it implies that the only civilization that matters is White with Greco-Roman roots.

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