told my girlfriend Liza that I was going camping for a week with some friends at a remote nature preserve in the mountains of Tennessee, where there would be no modern conveniences. She peered at me over the rims of her geek-chic glasses. “Now, why the hell would you want to do that?” she said. … Read more
There are some who would contend that women can’t—or shouldn’t—block, hit, or tackle. But one Saturday morning in late April, the players and coaches who constitute our state’s premier women’s tackle-football team, were demonstrating just how tough the gentler sex can be. For the team’s annual tryouts, the Minnesota Vixen had congregated in the lobby … Read more
The music by this experimental jazz guitarist is so phenomenally prodigious that we’d be sick of it by now, if Frisell didn’t keep reinventing himself. He’s played with John Zorn’s jazz punk band Naked City, recorded a series of meditations on American folk standards, paid homage to Malian blues, and covered pop and rock artists … Read more
I’m missing something. Not like glasses or dignity, things easily mislaid. No, it’s something essential, like a helix of DNA that should have come matched with my two X chromosomes. It’s the handbag gene. I exhibit other double-X-linked traits. For example, I’m exquisitely literate in clothing and shoes. I can identify a handmade buttonhole on … Read more
With his uncommonly graceful way with words, sharp eye for details, and knack for getting along with just about everybody, John McPhee can write compellingly about virtually any topic. His enormous body of work includes books about oranges, geology, watercraft, basketball, and characters both famous and anything but. In his latest book, the Pulitzer-winning journalist … Read more
It sounds like an easy enough job: Just fill in a little box with some scratchy pictures and a handful of words that will make people laugh. For even the best comic strip artists (i.e. Gary Larson, Bill Watterson, and, most recently, Aaron McGruder), however, it’s apparently hard work with a serious burnout risk. Yet … Read more
How tough would it be to juggle careers as a successful visual artist and an accomplished novelist? Mighty tough, one would suppose, although hardly pitiable. Such was the dilemma for Julia Glass, one of those rare people with bankable talent in two art forms. Having already achieved acclaim as a painter and rug hooker, Glass … Read more
It seems unfair to brand a writer as talented as Melissa Bank with the increasingly meaningless and disposable “chick lit” label. But there’s no denying that Bank’s Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, published in 2000, was on the leading edge of an avalanche of thinly veiled romance novels that have since come to dominate … Read more
In Calvin Trillin’s world, the secret to living the sweet life is simply making the right choices. And Trillin’s prolific writing career is nothing if not the chronicle of a lifetime of impeccable selections: He’s eaten the best food, lived in the coolest city, traveled to the most interesting places, and had the good fortune … Read more
Dropping Tish Jones off on a deserted island might seem like the height of cruelty; she is anything but solitary. A veteran of the poetry slam circuit, a national scene known for its ultra-social and quite self-confident performers, Jones sometimes even performs her own work in ensemble form. Together with poets Ed Bok Lee, Reggie … Read more