How Tough Should Journalists (or Any of Us) Be?
Can truth be found gently? What about hope, and grit?
Dispatches
Yes, We Can Be Ambivalent About the Death of Mass-Market Paperbacks
Almost anyone over the age of 40—dare it be said, even 35?—has their own indelible memory of this crafty little reading medium.
The Purpose of a Cookery Book
Like many old cookbooks, Jessie Conrad’s contains recipes we all still know and enjoy, such as an apple tart from scratch, as well as those you might not have enjoyed in a generation or two, such as calf’s kidney on toast; bacon pudding; pigeons with carrots; and “Boiled Mutton for an Invalid.”
Moltbook: Social for a Different Species
There was still a note of excitement when OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy remarked that having more than 150,000 AI agents wired in and making their own posts on Moltbook was unprecedented. The next time I checked, there were more than 1.5 million.
A Healthy Home Should Not Be a Luxury
Another fluffy news release about home interiors. I move to delete it—but the backstory catches me. An interior designer who had to tear apart her own home because her toddler was struggling to breathe? She wound up a certified expert in home wellness…
The Storms of St. Louis and the Shelter We Need for Them
Snow fell with the confidence of something that knew it would be felt. Streets emptied. Sound dulled. The city became a held breath between east and west, a place where movement slowed because it had to. There was nothing especially dramatic about this at first. Just cold. Just accumulation.
The Haunting Memory of the Ghost Housing Project in St. Louis
It seems like St. Louis would like to bury this heart-wrenching failure beneath time. However, fortunately and unfortunately, it is hard to be metabolized. For fifty years, no developer could truly swallow the land left vacant after Pruitt-Igoe was demolished.
What Are You Planning to Do with That?
For many college and university graduates, this is not a brief phase but a long-term reality, one that turns the job market into something that feels less like a promise and more like a gamble.
Our Gamified Lives
Duolingo. The best way to learn Spanish, right? Gamified so thoroughly that even I—who loathe competition in any form—got hooked. The characters were fun, and the constant invisible pressure had me coming home tired and rushing to do my Duolingo, worried that I would finish past midnight and lose…
The Improbable Museum of Winston Churchill
Finding a museum dedicated entirely to Churchill, in Fulton, Missouri, two hours west of St. Louis, seems as odd as it would be to find a Charles de Gaulle museum in Brooklyn (the one in lower Alabama), just north of Rome (in Alabama’s Conecuh National Forest).