Eastern Ohio Jimmy the Greek, the odds-maker and point-spread pioneer who was born and raised and trained in Steubenville, the former (thirties-era) cigar store paradise thirty miles to my east, once observed that “crime has always struck m...
Given the unpopular and uncompromising stands that Wendell Berry takes, it’s only natural that many readers fiercely disagree with him. Some of these disagreements are simply matters of preference. As one of his stories has it, “It is perha...
Bob Dylan: The Lyrics, 1961-2012 Reviewed by Robert Dean Lurie I am one of the infected; I am a Bob Dylan fan. It wasn’t always this way. When I first encountered Dylan’s music in my teens, I heard what the critics hear: a bleating, off-key...
Utah Max Weber never visited the American Southwest, but few theories explain the mass tourism of the region better than his iron cage of disenchantment. The German sociologist saw the modern world as a lifeless system of technology and bur...
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Coming to grips with what the 2016 election means many things, especially for those of us who are hoping to find in Trump’s victory a wake-up call to think again, and better, about how to commit to and ...
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] So at the beginning of the month, when I finally got my election reflections out of my system, I concluded by re-iterating what I said back in November: that whoever won the presidency, the localist alternati...
BURNED-OVER DISTRICT, NY — As rumors of rogue electors spike the December air, I offer this piece from 2001, which is included in my Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from An Alternative America, which of course you, as a ...
[Cross-posted to In Medias Res] Yes, I know the election was a month ago. What can I say; I needed time to recover from getting everything entirely wrong, didn’t I? 1) Except, maybe I didn’t quite get everything entirely wrong. ...
Like many Americans I’ve struggled to put the election of 2016 in proper perspective the last few weeks, only to arrive at an unexpected conclusion: Trump may be America’s first Black Friday President. In choosing The Donald over The Hil, c...
Queens, NY The city goes on. And this phenomenon, of a city continuing even as it is under threat or attacked– of resiliency in a city– is surely one of the great signs of its health. Victor Hugo describes this phenomenon with...
