Loving Baseball and the Meaningful Life
Four years ago, I was in a local antique shop called Salvage Alley. A black window shade with gold lettering was hanging from the rafters. The shade said, “Negro League Baseball Tickets Sold Here.”
Campaign That Tune
Using a common language, whether verbal or musical, can ultimately create a community of people (in this case political supporters) that votes, sings, speaks, and even feels similarly. A candidate’s repertoire of songs can, in effect, address voters’ concerns.
Roaming Rebels
How mainstream transgender appeals to bathroom privacy and equality buy into the sanitization of American spaces and lives.
Brazil’s Black and Tan Fantasy of Whiteness
Brazil’s showcasing of “The Girl from Ipanema” at the Rio 2016 Olympic Opening Ceremony demonstrated the extent to which Brazil, and the famous bossa nova song, construct a national story celebrating diversity while also relying on symbols rooted in stereotypes.
Who is the Tall, Dark Stranger there in My Living Room?[1]
In the days when it was a piece of furniture, TV was both the dark mahogany stranger in the house and the loyal companion, both threatening and familiar, something that seemed to control and something that seemed to transport. The mistake people today make is assuming that television audiences of 50 years ago were more naïve than they are today.
Zombie Music
“Jazz is dead!” “Long live jazz!” These competing diagnoses define the genre and its evolving boundaries. And that means a future of interesting music.
Cops and American Culture
Why our culture of law enforcement—and tensions between police and communities—is a lot more nuanced and interesting than you might think.
Tales of the Fight Game
Both the LeDoux and Inoki fights are mere footnotes on Muhammad Ali’s athletic resume. Yet Paul Levy’s biography of LeDoux, The Fighting Frenchman, and Josh Gross’s exhaustive account of Ali vs. Inoki, give readers another way of looking at fights that elevated their importance, if not for Ali, then for the men who opposed him in these bouts.
Pooh Bear and Peter Rabbit
McDowell’s and Aalto’s respective books, published by the same press within two years of each other, are impressive studies of the relationship between literature and landscapes, both emotional and physical, in Potter’s Peter Rabbit and Milne’s Pooh Bear.
The Saga of Senate Bill 5
How state lawmakers seeking a solution to St. Louis County’s municipal revenue problems found more than they bargained for.
