Essays

I was used to my makeup and costume, but the one-inch heels, painful toes, and tight uppers of my tanker boots made me walk suspiciously, like a poor guy with a belly full of free eggs and a heart filled with larceny. My overall straps hung down in back like I had forgotten to fasten them after a trip to the outhouse. Yet the staff treated me and everyone else with cheerful professionalism. They knew how to handle an army of amateurs and loose cannons and get the job done.

Arts & Letters | Essays

How the Wreckage of Slavery Washes Upon the Shores of a Small Island

This island is extraordinary, and indifferent to that fact. The past is alive wherever you turn, though with few historic markers and little protection. Artifacts, ruins, and human remains have been tossed aside, laid claim to, or layered over, yet they refuse to be erased.

Society & Culture | Essays

The Populism of Art

Why does art ease our minds? I think because it takes us away from words. It lets us express what words cannot. There is mischief in creation, after all. You are plotting and scheming, not mindlessly obeying.

A Real Knowhere Man

No one had explained what extras could do (choose their own movements to some extent) or could not do (complain or speak to the big names). No one ever said not to look into a camera lens or try to steal a scene. (Of course I knew better than that.) I did not know that most of the main actors were on site. I did not know what determined the length of workdays, or how often water or pee breaks might happen. I did not know yet the tricks some extras used to get on set when it was not their turn, or how many took leftover meals and crafty snacks home to live on as part of their pay.

She’s Leaving Home, Bye-Bye

Seneca said we each dwell in two communities: the place of our birth, and the community that “is truly great and truly common, in which we look neither to this corner nor to that, but measure the boundaries of our nation by the sun.” I would far rather be a citizen of the world than, by accident of birth, an American. I feel disloyal writing this.

The Adventures and Misadventures of Samuel Clemens

By Wayne Fields

Everything about Mark Twain, Ron Chernow shows us, is writ large, heartbreak and loss a constant redundancy, his explosive fits of anger and condemnation, his repeated lapses into sentimentality, a reiteration of public complaints somehow enabled rather than contradicted by his wondrous humor, a wit at once profound and outrageous. But Twain’s is merely an exaggeration of our existence, its pain and its joy, our past, and our culture, inescapably our Americanness.

Arts & Letters | Essays

A Memo on My Idea of America

Everyone past the age of reason carries an internal model of the nation where they live. The model describes, with varying complexity and correspondence to reality, the landscape, climate, cultures, history, vibes, and human possibilities and dangers, including what that person believes they can be in relation to their country, and their expectations for treatment by the government and fellow citizens. If enough people talk about their overlapping models, you might get political parties, widespread patriotism, rebellion, nationalism, or talk of a zeitgeist.

Hiking with the Lorax of Shawnee National Forest

Sam Stearns is a rascal who has seen lively times. Some of those have been while working with other environmentalists—for almost four decades without pay and at significant personal risk—in defense of southeastern Illinois’s Shawnee National Forest, which they hope will become a National Park and the world’s first climate preserve.

This Story Should Not Have Ended This Way

Qusay Hussein Al-Mamari gives advice regularly: so much was so hard for him, and he knows how to make it easier for other people. “Whatever you are going through, say, ‘Everything has an ending.’ We have a date to die, our food expires, a building will one day collapse. So whatever situation you’re in, it will have an ending. One day, it will be over. So there is no need to stress about life. And for any person who does not see that life is beautiful, please do not make it hard on other people.”