Music
“By his own account, the model for the Grand Ole Opry radio show was a hoedown Hay attended ‘in a log cabin about a mile up a muddy road’ outside a little Arkansas burg called Mammoth Spring.” It’s a Monday in late August. I stand in the middle of a dirt road, flush on the »
Music
It’s a Tuesday afternoon at Southpoint Mall in Durham, North Carolina. As I window shop, I notice LeAnn Rimes’s “Nothin’ Better to Do” playing from the speakers. It’s followed by a pleasant but unassuming mix of songs from Kenny Chesney, Miranda Lambert, and Kacey Musgraves. This is a country music playlist. On my last two »
Poetry
A Day of It He’d put on a pot of beansand leave them to simmerthen rake a pile of leavesfrom her old flower bedsand get a smolder started.He’d cut a plug of Brown Muleand tuck it in his cheekthen lean on the rake,shifting the pile now and thento let air to the fire,arranging the sparksand »
Poetry
But I always had a bit of an authenticity complex,plus, D the waitress whispers, that’s not real Brown’s.and when my town has built an empiric tourism industryaround “authenticity”—something they stole to begin with—it’s hard to smell the stakes through mouthfuls of fake blood.Even Brown’s changed ownership recently and began renovation. I do wish to do »
Music
Featuring some of the songs, artists, and movements mentioned in the issue, this collection brings you country music’s beating heart and storied soul: Heartaches and homecomings. Hip-hop and hoedowns. Heroes and heroines, penning hits and swinging hammers. Icons and up-and-comers. Fiddles and banjos. Boots and backroads and bulls. Ancestors and descendants from the hometowns and »
Food
My mother loves to tell the story of how I came into the world “bellering like a bull” and continued throughout my childhood to produce cries that rattled the walls, matched by an equally big laugh. This is proof, she implies, that I’ve always been more fire than she can handle. But life has a »
Art
This is a review of MONUMENTS at The Museum of Contemporary Art and The Brick at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, California, on view through May 6, 2026. MONUMENTS does something powerful and all too rare in recent group exhibitions of contemporary art. It does not tell us what to think and then »
1. The government did not want to claim the dead. I believe that they did not want the death count after Katrina to exceed the number of people who died on 9/11. That would mean someone would have to get bombed, I guess. Or at least blamed. I know that doesn’t sound right. Nothing that »
Art
As the Nasher Museum of Art celebrates its 20th anniversary, curators Marshall Price and Xuxa Rodríguez sit down to talk about two exhibitions now on view—Everything Now All At Once and Coming into Focus—and what it means to build a collection in the South today. Marshall Price: What does the title Everything Now All At »
Politics
From 1956 to 1965, the residents of the boom state of Florida were held hostage to a McCarthy-esque investigation with the power to declare anyone who opposed segregation—including Black integrationists and closeted queer teachers—to be Communists, perverts, and “enemies of the people.” Officially called the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, this group of white lawmakers was »
Food
Longtime journalist Judy Walker worked as the food editor at the New Orleans–based Times-Picayune for about a year before Hurricane Katrina hit. Most of the newspaper staff, including Walker, evacuated to Baton Rouge and worked in a temporary office in the aftermath of the storm. By mid-October, the newspaper returned to New Orleans and the food section »
On August 29, 2005, when I was twenty-four and living in Connecticut, I watched the levees surrounding metropolitan New Orleans collapse on television. I called my ex-girlfriend, a fifth-generation New Orleanian who was then living in Lafayette. When she answered the phone, I heard crying in the background. Friends from New Orleans had evacuated to »