Festooned with daisies, an orange-and-yellow-striped bus with bee wings attached to its top and a license plate that reads “HOP2IT” pulls up to the corner on a rainy spring day. Who is the driver? A dapper bunny, of course. Mills’ text breaks into a familiar tune: “One hoppity bus goes SPLISH and SPLASH, / SPLISH […]
This freewheeling tour of human history and psychic life—by a professor of political science at the University of Chicago—invites us to think about our inner beings. The human “self” is no real thing out there, Oliver argues, but rather a complex construction of social, religious, and political institutions. The ancient Greek dictum, “know thyself,” really […]
After young Memory Feather’s father runs off with a “French hussy” and leaves her and her mother, Virginia, nearly destitute in New Mexico, they reluctantly move to Virginia’s hometown of Belle Cote, Mississippi. Virginia detests the town’s bigotry and insular attitudes, and she dreads being dependent on her loving but judgmental parents, but it’s 1953 […]
Carla’s thrilled that Vision Screening Day’s approaching. She hopes she’ll need glasses because no one else in class wears them. Her friend Buster scoffs, “You like to be different.” Next day, Carla’s wearing self-made purple pipe-cleaner frames. She tells Buster she wants to see what styles and colors will flatter her when she gets real […]
Who would guess that U.S. domestic military bases harbor more types of rare animals than national parks do? Making that claim, Collard points to relatively recent changes in general official attitudes toward the environmental effects of military tests and exercises, while highlighting efforts to protect and restore populations of three vulnerable creatures in particular—the red-cockaded […]
It all starts with a ham radio that Alice, Lawrence, and Artie fool around with in 1944 and Henry, Frances, and Lukas find in 2023. It’s late April, and the 1944 kids worry about loved ones in combat, while the 2023 kids study the war in school. When, impossibly, the radio allows the kids to […]
In 2016, in Cincinnati, voters overwhelmingly approved raising their taxes to fund city preschools, “with targeted resources for poor—mostly Black—communities.” Johns Hopkins political scientist Han took note, especially because the numbers were markedly different in the presidential election: Cincinnati went for Clinton by 10 points, but the voters approved the school initiative by 24, so […]
Boston-based jazz lover and alcoholic Elder Darrow owns a bar—the Esposito—but he’s been slowly losing his passion for the business, and the drinking is starting to catch up with him. When Elder’s best friend, Boston police detective Dan Burton, is gunned down in what appears to be a random liquor store robbery, Elder barely has […]
The political crisis culminating in the deposition of Richard II in 1399 by his cousin, Henry of Bolingbroke, ignited the issue of sovereign legitimacy between the houses of York and Lancaster for the next 85 years. In her probing work in four parts, with chapters titled after lines from the Shakespeare plays, Castor delves into […]
Mintz begins at a dark moment, when, soon after Lennon was killed, he is charged with inventorying the musician’s countless possessions: roomfuls of guitars, the attaché cases with which he was smitten, boxes of cassettes and their works in progress, granny glasses “in a rainbow of tinted colors.” He came into this responsibility circuitously. As […]