A Shift Unlike Any Other
To study aging and its impacts on a campus that, seemingly, never ages can be a stark reminder of a crucial dynamic at work.
Essays
Most Recent: Nice Work If You Can Get It
Miles Ahead and Born to be Blue draw on the sacrifices professional musicians make for their art, and the consequences that result. Complaints could be lodged. But for the sake of jazz, both are worth discussing.
Horns On Film
Twenty films on, and about, jazz hit every note in the genre. And then some.
“Race” and Science
Yudell shows how scientists, even with the best intentions of modernizing the concept of race to keep up with current evidence, often wound up reinforcing its standard view to help insure its survival.
Essay of the Month: “The Decay of Essay Writing”
"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 Tour of the Divided City
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 Court of Obama
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.
Essay of the Month: “The Fight”
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.
Screening Africa
The new venture Afripedia is out to change your view of the continent, one featured artist at a time.
Party Entry
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.