Ray Bradbury and the Last Global Pandemic

AS WE MARK one year of living in a COVID world, I am reminded of talking about the last major pandemic — the influenza of 1918 — with the late author Ray Bradbury. For all the years I spent with him (12 in total, five during which I saw him every two weeks, flying from Chicago to Los Angeles as I was writing his authorized biography), he would often...

1h

I’m Going to Build a Heaven of My Own: The Harry Smith B-Sides

AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC evolves as a shared expression, primarily among musicians: the repertoire passes among — and is altered by — performers in a sort of musical communion. Chronicling the multifarious history of folk music are a few iconic books and records: Carl Sandburg’s The American Songbag (1927), which features transcriptions of the nation’s best-loved...

3h

Why the Most Powerful Nation in World History Keeps Losing Wars (and How That Could Affect Biden’s Foreign Policy)

PRESIDENT BIDEN PROCLAIMS that “America is back.” That promise could mean a turn away from Trump’s rejection and disruption of existing treaties and alliances, even though Trump, for all his belligerence, did not initiate any new wars, even as he boasted about the power of US weaponry. More likely, Biden will return to the combination of diplomacy and...

5h

Under Lockdown with Raymond Chandler

IF YOU’RE EVER heading south down the Interstate 5 in high summer, when the temperature is over 100 and the Southern California hillsides look and smell like tinder, consider turning off the freeway at some point and winding your way through the canyons to the sea. Somewhere past Laguna Niguel, the road turns into the Pacific Coast Highway, and then...

1d

The World Most of Us Don’t See: A Conversation with Katherine Seligman

I FIRST MET KATHERINE SELIGMAN at The Writers Grotto in San Francisco, a co-working community of authors with a history stretching back 26 years. Her compassion and intelligence immediately impressed me. I knew her then as a veteran journalist who had been a writer at the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine and whose work had been featured in Life, Redbook,...

1d

The Baba Yaga Takes the A Train

I REMEMBER the first time I went to Detroit. I was presenting a paper at a conference being held downtown at Wayne State University, and I took the opportunity to step across the street to the Detroit Institute of Arts. As I entered the building, I was immediately immersed in the massive Detroit Industry Murals, completed by muralist Diego Rivera in...

1d

Nick Pinkerton Says Goodbye to Dragon Inn

Subscribe on Podcasts | Spotify | SoundCloud Kate Wolf is joined by writer and film critic Nick Pinkerton to discuss his book-length essay on Tsai Ming-liang’s film Goodbye, Dragon Inn, which revolves around the final screening at a cinema in Taiwan — on the very day that 300 movie theaters were shuttered across Southern California. The book is both...

2d

Brushing Off the Dust: On “I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust”

IN THEIR DEBUT MEMOIR, I Have Been Buried Under Years of Dust, mother/daughter duo Valerie Gilpeer, a legal advocate for autistic children, and co-author Emily Grodin, her formerly nonverbal adult daughter with autism, explore what it means to be “saddled” with this developmental disability, as well as what it looks like to have a communications breakthrough...

2d

Searching for Healing in a Darkening Land

WHAT DOES IT MEAN to heal as a Native American? Brandon Hobson’s new novel, The Removed, asks this question as it follows a Native family, the Echotas, 15 years after the loss of their son Ray-Ray to police violence. Shot at a Tulsa, Oklahoma, mall on the same day as the Cherokee National Holiday, Ray-Ray’s death coincides with the commemoration of...

2d

The Meaning of Lokman Slim

LOKMAN SLIM WAS FOUND SLUMPED over in the passenger seat of his Toyota with four bullets to the head and one to the back on February 4. Though his car was found outside Addoussieh in South Lebanon, his phone was retrieved from a field 36 kilometers away in Niha al-Janoub, a village he frequented once a week to have lunch with a friend, a general in...

2d