What is the likely career trajectory of an inventive, gifted Teacher of the Year who is passionate about racial and social justice and who works in an urban public school? […]
BOOK REVIEW
In x + y, Eugenia Cheng Envisions a World Without Gender
New terminology would prioritize ‘community over self’
Watch a video clip of mathematician Eugenia Cheng making puff pastry with Stephen Colbert, and you’ll quickly appreciate why her students at the Art Institute of Chicago surely consider themselves […]
BOOK REVIEW
Hugh Raffles’s Relentless Riffs in a Book of Unconformities
Exploring Earthly phenomena in a most encyclopedic way
A long sentence careens through Hugh Raffles’s The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time. At 458 words, the sentence zigzags from a description of a helicopter ride gone wrong […]
BOOK REVIEW
Carl Hiaasen to Trump: Squeeze Me
Seeking vengeance for the un-sunshiny state of things
Leave it to satirist Carl Hiaasen to name the house band at Casa Bellicosa “The Collusionists.” Casa Bellicosa, a thinly disguised stand-in for Mar-a-Lago, is the Palm Beach setting at […]
BOOK REVIEW
In Memorial Drive, Poet Natasha Trethewey Revisits Her Mother’s Death
A daughter’s memoir untangles trauma and grapples with festering grief
In “Monument,” a poem in Native Guard, Natasha Trethewey describes watching ants bring soil up from her mother’s grave. “Believe me when I say/ I’ve tried not to begrudge them/ […]
BOOK REVIEW
The Wild, Weird, Witty Way of Birds
Jennifer Ackerman finds reflections of ourselves at the edges of bird behavior
Long ago, my children and I celebrated at the library whenever we came across a favorite picture book by Arnold Lobel. No matter how many times we read it, The […]
BOOK REVIEW
The Contrasts and Convergence of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.
Penial Joseph’s The Sword and the Shield examines the titans of black power and civil rights
In 1972, James Baldwin wrote “The Shot That Echoes Still,” a painful and personal essay for Esquire magazine reflecting on the assassinations of Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther […]
BOOK REVIEW
In Why Fish Don’t Exist, Lulu Miller Finds Truth in Taxonomy
Reflecting on the obsessions of a Stanford scientist, she heals herself
Lulu Miller calls David Starr Jordan, the protagonist of her book Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life, “David.” Born in the […]
BOOK REVIEW
Racism and The Broken Heart of America
Walter Johnson’s history of St. Louis documents the causes of a continuing crisis
In the months after the murder of black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014, historian Walter Johnson began work on The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and […]
POETRY
Scissors (for Max)
Slip a pair of scissors in your pocket, my son. Lace your thumb and pointer through the hand holds. Steady! Leave the realm of your home, out the front door, […]
BOOK REVIEW
Unearthing the Corporate Misdeeds Behind ‘Death in Mud Lick’
Eric Eyre’s intrepid reporting on the opioid epidemic has a timely message
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Eyre braids together two riveting stories in Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight Against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic. Numbers are […]
BOOK REVIEW
Four Reporters Who Shook the World
Nancy Cott’s Fighting Words recalls those who wrote history in the making
It is generally accepted that what news reporters write is consigned to obscurity. Journalism from long ago may be useful for documenting a certain time or place, but, otherwise, the […]
CAREGIVING
Past Practices of Cookery and Hygiene
Finding comfort in ‘simple remedies’ and suffrage sarcasm
I turned to old cookbooks for comfort last week, wondering what my American foremothers had done in times of crisis and scarcity. Given that our best strategy at slowing the […]
BOOK REVIEW
Unequal Protection Under the Law
Adam Cohen’s Supreme Inequality finds the Court guilty of ruling unfairly
Forty-seven years ago this month, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell concluded that the state of Texas did not have to remedy inequalities in school funding across deeply segregated school […]
BOOK REVIEW
The Hell-bent Women of Suffrage
Ellen DuBois explores a relentless fight’s strategies and divisions
There are but 29 words to the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was formally adopted on Aug. 26, 1920: “The right of the citizens of the United States […]
