My father, a painter and filmmaker, told me this: Any frame from a good movie should be a good photograph, and any square inch of a good painting should also be a good painting. I was sitting on the bench seat at the kitchen table. He was at the refrigerator...
Now, in the heat of summer, isn’t the best time for this metaphor, but soon enough it will be: the New Englander walks through dead histories the way they walk through leaves in the autumn, whether they are conscious of it or not. I don’t mean the remnants of the...
Some of this is the obvious kind of rhetoric which we have long come to expect in the speeches of victorious presidential candidates — indeed, maybe using such rhetoric is exactly part of the calming, “back to normalcy” feeling which Biden wants to project. Of course, we all know that Biden...
1921: Nearly a century ago, in Tulsa, the city where I grew up, a Black man allegedly assaulted a White woman in an elevator downtown. In the following days, White rioters reacted by burning and destroying city blocks of black-owned businesses in the Greenwood District on the north side of...
This past summer, white parents across the United States repeatedly asked the same question: “How should I talk to my white child about race?” In response, parenting magazine writers, bloggers and newspaper columnists framed article after article as responses to this question. Again and again, social scientists who study families...
My grandad’s father John Speed Stephens Jr. was the son of an Irish immigrant, and as a fourteen-year-old, he became the pioneer who planted the Stephens in Indian territory, pre-Oklahoma. This is his story, passed on by my father, born in Palmer, Oklahoma. Many of the details were told to...
My daughter has my hurt in her. She lives with it better than I have. I hid it, softened it, made it acceptable, and then called my compromise a success. An achievement of normal. She faces it, endures it, mocks it by parody, dismissal, lightness. No big deal. It is...
A while ago I was at a party when I saw a stranger’s lock screen from across the room. It was a picture of a man with a receding hairline wearing aviator glasses and sitting, slouching, in a red chair. I asked, though just to confirm what I already knew...
As I dragged my family around the country from one academic job to another, No Reservations, Bourdain’s culinary travel-and-adventure series was a constant — a comforting event once a week in our hectic lives. I developed a weekly ritual of experimenting with popcorn toppings inspired by each country Bourdain featured. My creations...
Ishmael Reed is back in the news these days. The writer, now eighty-one years old, got national attention for his latest play, The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda. Most of the headlines of pieces on the play are some variation of “Ishmael Reed Does Not Like Hamilton,” and indeed he does...
