How Artists’ Palettes Have Changed–and How We Have
Colors drawn from nature are now synthetic and often garish...much like our daily life.
Dispatches
Christmas Creep Has Left Us Confused
Like children, we rush the season, celebrating each holiday long before it arrives and growing sick of all of them. Sure, greedy retailers—but does the problem go deeper?
Requiem for a Punster: Leonard Slatkin Pays Tribute to P.D.Q. Bach (and Peter Schickele)
On Monday, November 25, Leonard Slatkin and the Chamber Music Society of St. Louis will present D.BachL, presumably pronounced “debacle,” a tribute to the composer Peter Schickele.
How Our Mail-Order Age Warps Time and Desire
Romantic anguish, or desires, are set off within seconds via texts. Consumer fulfillment is stretched like taffy whenever we check tracking services on an order. If you endure the returns process waiting in line at the post office, or Amazon returns location, it becomes a sentence on a desert island. Never will the two points of fulfillment meet.
We Drink So We Can Trust Each Other
The three-martini lunch, once standard, turned scandalous in the seventies, hastily replaced by light beer and wine coolers. Then came a defiant resurgence of glam cocktails and cigar bars, followed by a wave of sober-curious shaming....
Architecture Can Heal Us
Our everyday environment “used to be quaint and quirky,” Vishaan Chakrabarti writes. “Now it is mundane and monolithic.”
The 2024 Election Through the Eyes of a Nineteenth-Century Historian
Tocqueville’s book on the French Revolution is less known in our country than his larger book chronicling American social character. In this era of “America First!” it makes sense that we prefer to read about ourselves. Ancien Régime and the Revolution, though, contains political arguments more important to our time because ours is a time of seismic political change.
Mind the Gap: Tracking the Distance Between Forest Park Today and Filipino “Human Zoos” of the 1904 World’s Fair
Immigrants seeking refuge in the country responsible for their humanitarian crisis is not new. Particularly for America. What was new, however, was the largest human zoo in the world modeled in our own backyard, two years after the Philippine-American war ended.
The National Archives Deletes Our Problematic Past
Slavery, the Holocaust, Japanese internment camps, the birth control pill--all much too messy and confrontational to remember.
The Asian Women Named Mary
Witness the “woman” of “Asian descent.” Is this the face of waiting? Of looking? Of becoming? Of otherizing? Did she shuffle to the chair before sitting? Did she walk quickly?