Essays

Talking with Terrance Hayes

"This moment is a great leveler. My inner resources are the opposite of capitalism—not to rely on anything other than your capacity to make stuff as a way of spending your time. I’ve always thought that. It’s all in the work. What I would say to my kids when they were going to school: be sure to make something today even if you’re making trouble. The idea is maker’s knowledge."

Remembering Judge Charles A. Shaw

“Charles as a judge was never oppressive nor demeaning to lawyers,” says former Assistant U.S. Attorney David Rosen, now an adjunct law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “He erred on the side of being human.”

The Driving Lesson

I had driven a few blocks, but pulled the car over. I looked at my daughter for a moment and realized that God does indeed give only ironic gifts.

Little Car, Big Impact

In the middle of her life, fortunes falling, my mother bought a little car with the beauty of a well-made toy. It was economical, utilitarian, self-effacing, and anti-macho—all the things she needed or wanted at that point.

Long Red Monte Carlo

A lot of people love the feel and freedom of driving—certainly our culture celebrates those things—but those were outweighed for me by other factors, chief among them the astounding ease with which I can get lost.

Beetles for Sale

In the last thirty years when the majority of the world moved on from the little car, the dying Bug found a new life in Latin America. Mexicans embraced the car and in turn the Beetle not only found a new home, but also a new sense of identity.

“Automobiles are a useless nuisance”

The Magnificent Ambersons is a novel that can—and should—be taken on its own terms. While progress in the novel is widely shorthanded as industrialization, it is specifically pegged to a single technology: the rise, and eventual supremacy, of the automobile.

On Cars as Art

When Italian carmaker Enzo Ferrari declared the 1961 British Jaguar E-type sports car the most beautiful car ever made, it was a rare instance of a functional design object coming to be seen as a work of art. Thirty-five years later, Ferrari’s assessment was vindicated when the original Jaguar E-type was put on display in the Museum of Modern Art.

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