Memoir
For the last couple years of her life, until she died at the age of ninety-six, my grandmother Lala saw and heard ghosts. (You may have a Nana or a Meemaw; my brother and cousins and I had a Lala.) Many of those who’ve spent time with people nearing death are familiar with this phenomenon. »
Music
On August 26, 1967, the Lads of Liverpool (a.k.a. the Beatles) yielded the no. 1 spot on Billboard’s pop chart to an unknown musician. Mississippian Bobbie Gentry’s iconic song, “Ode to Billie Joe,” remained in that space for four weeks. During that time, her audience latched onto what seemed to be a mystery in the »
Photo Essay
America’s origin myth is prevalent on the three peninsulas that form the western shores of Virginia—from George Washington’s Birthplace on the Northern Neck to the Mattaponi tribe’s museum in King William County, which exhibits a necklace that belonged to Pocahontas. Alongside those larger myths are smaller ones that compete for attention: a clock repair shop’s »
Poetry
said the rabbis, around the Torah. And this worldis lousy with them. More than we can counton our dog walk alone: chainlink and stone and white wooden pickets. Fences to keep people’s bad barking dogsin, to keep our bad barking dog out. His nostrils flaringwide as a twirled skirt as he reads the tales of »
Essay
Lake Charlotte started to bother me one summer while I was working on a freelance project with a nonprofit called Trees Atlanta. Somewhere in the organization’s sunny building, I saw a poster illustrating Atlanta’s tree canopy—a kind of heat map of trees that needed saving. Red-orange blocks downtown sprawled into yellow-green neighborhoods and green parks. »
Photo Essay
I. Geographer Dennis Cosgrove has written that American landscapes may best be apprehended from the air. So vast are US landscapes and, likewise, our interventions to rework them, that a vantage point at that level of remove is necessary to appreciate the scale of physical and human geographies here. Nowhere, perhaps, is that perspective more »
Essay
Land of the sweet, never sour, Sugar Land, Texas, offers a surburban alternative outside the expanding Houston area.1 The city has gone by many names. In 1838, two years into the Republic of Texas’s victory over the Republic of Mexico, what is now Sugar Land was named the Oakland Plantation. Stephen F. Austin (the “Father »
Essay
When the body of Jose Ponce Arreola—one of three workers killed during the October 12, 2019 collapse of the Hard Rock Hotel in New Orleans—was finally removed from the hotel ruins in August 2020, the press asked his brother, Sergio, what should be built once the rubble was cleared. Sergio said, “A park dedicated to »
Photo Essay
In her series (Untitled) Kitchen Table (1990), photographer Carrie Mae Weems explores and questions perceived notions of racial and racially gendered identity, using the familiar, everyday experience of a woman seated at a domestic kitchen table. Alternating between images of herself alone and with a male lover, child, or with other women, she figures the »
Essay
“Entering the park was like visiting an idealized past.” As Clement A. Evans, the Confederate general turned Methodist minister, mounted the makeshift pulpit and surveyed his surroundings on April 27, 1890, Atlanta’s Grant Park appeared more like a military camp than a public pleasure ground. Rows of white tents were erected on the greensward and »
Essay
It was not supposed to end like this. On September 15, 1896, “Crush, Texas,” was supposed to be just another kinetic spectacle in a place replete with them. The name was a double entendre, both a cheeky allusion to the staged head-on train collision scheduled to take place there and an eponym for William G. »
Photo Essay
When I was six years old, my family and I packed up our life in four suitcases and left Sanming, my hometown, located in the western Fujian province of China. I didn’t know where I was going, and my parents didn’t know what they were expecting. All we knew was that we were moving to »