The Nominal Joys of a Discombobulated Text
‘Tristram Shandy’ and ‘Riddley Walker’ stand as scurrilous hold-outs, novels that experiment with form, juggle your expectations, and even jangle your nerves.
Dispatches
The Vilified Elite…Poodle
Want to understand what tore this country apart? The fate of the poodle is your fable.
Remembering R.E.M. Explored by SLSO on Its One-Year Anniversary
Though St. Louis cannot claim the April 5 debut of “R.E.M. Explored” as the church in Athens can for the band itself, this performance featured a new sequence of the program that has become standard in subsequent concerts, not to mention the only time Mills’s compositions have been re-imagined by Marsh and Mallamud’s orchestrations and performed by a symphony orchestra on the iconic date of R.E.M.’s nativity.
A Parlor Game for the Times: Whose Psyche Is Darker?
Would you rather be manipulated or punched in the gut?
“Hands Off!” Rally in Illinois the Calm Before a Possible Storm
No one was protesting in downtown Champaign, with its popular restaurants, bars, and coffee shops. No MAGA believer showed up with an assault rifle, as someone did in Indiana, or with a Nazi flag, as a man did in St. Louis’s Metro East.
Professor Snyder is Not Fleeing the Country
The U.S. administration, destabilizing and unjustifiable in nearly all its actions, said Yale historian Timothy Snyder, “at its depth comes down to hero worship”—of Putin, Musk, Trump—but in the end we are sacrificing ourselves, “our children, our grandchildren, the possibility of life on earth….”
Looking Hip in the Gaza Strip? My Useless Act of Indie-Rock Prophecy
Before the president of the United States publicly imagined the Gaza Strip as a hip Middle Eastern Riviera, I only ever told this story to mock myself at parties. It was one of my bits. It turns out I am a prophet, I would declare.
Searching for a Loose Confidence
I do not want to live like this anymore, scripted and tight and rigid.
Dead Malls and Dreams
Malls sold us canned fantasy. It could have been so different.
Do I Hate the Modern or Just What It Fails to Represent?
Finally, I confess...and realize what I have been missing.