Essays

“The peculiar form of an essay implies a peculiar substance; you can say in this shape what you cannot with equal fitness say in any other.”

A popular bus tour of St. Louis reveals the city’s larger patterns to make its central narrative, and long-standing tensions, stand out.

The notion that sports leads politics, represented in feel-good accounts of Jackie Robinson ending racism, have long since failed to pass muster. Yet perhaps the true audacity of hoop in the age of Obama is that off-court political issues are considered by the widest swath of American publics when voiced by those on it.

William Hazlitt’s trail-blazing essay on staged fights in the English countryside, considered “blackguard” in its day, still speaks to the thrill of sporting events.

The new venture Afripedia is out to change your view of the continent, one featured artist at a time.

Steven C. Smith, WUSTL professor of political science and social science, explains why smaller parties pop up all the time in the United States, but seldom last.

The 2016 Academy Awards nominations’ whiteness has become a national civil rights issue. In his opening monologue at the ceremony, host Chris Rock stated: “I’m sure there wasn’t no black nominees [in] ’62 or ’63. And black people did not protest. Why? Because we had real things to protest at the time.” Rock was in […]

M. Lynn Weiss, associate professor of English and American Studies at William & Mary, conducts at 2014 interview with Adrienne Kennedy, one of the most prominent voices of African-American theater.

Until I could find an apartment, I rode the No. 6 bus up and down Highway 99 most of the night, from downtown to Aurora Village, listening to muffled, skewed robotic drum beats of fellow travelers from behind the earphones of turned-up Walkmans, looking out into the dark. No, scratch that, looking at myself in the reflection of myself on bus windows in the dark.

Brittany “Bree” Newsome gets down to Earth after scaling South Carolina’s Capitol-grounds flag pole.