A movement in Jackson, Mississippi is working to remake the way the city governs, feeds, and runs itself in order to serve the black community.
Oxford American
Posted inArts & Culture, Food, Nonfiction, Quotes
Following John McPhee’s Path to ‘Oranges’
Fifty years after he published Oranges, one writer traces McPhee’s story to Florida to assess the state of American citrus.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Portrait of an Artist Who Flattered Donald Trump
Visiting Mar-a-Lago with Ralph Wolfe Cowan, who has painted celebrities like Elvis Presley, Elizabeth Taylor, and Donald Trump.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Palm Beach Van Dyck
A “willingness to flout the laws of space and time” help painter Ralph Cowan form relationships with the kind of people who will pay for a portrait of themselves with a lion, at the mast of a ship, or gliding through a Venetian dreamscape.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Small Town Crushed By a Big Weight — the Military-Industrial Complex
This meticulously-reported piece explores the bungled investigation into a 1994 double murder in Oak Grove, Kentucky, a small town weighed down by the military-industrial complex.
Posted inEditor's Pick
A Town Under Trial
What an unsolved double murder in Kentucky reveals about America’s military-industrial complex.
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Quotes
Of the Parade, But Not In the Parade: The Mardi Gras Flambeaux
Louisiana Rien Fertel explores the complex history of New Orleans’ flambeaux — the men who carry the torches that light the way for Mardi Gras parades — in Oxford American.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Keepers of the Light
New Orleans’s complicated history with the Mardi Gras flambeaux — the (usually black) torch carriers who, for years, lit the way for the festival’s (usually white) parades.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Living the American Dream in Comer, Georgia: The Garden of Refugees
The story of Eh Kaw Htoo, a Karen refugee from Myanmar — a man who “extolled the redneck’s work ethic” and helped build a community of 150 Karens who sustain one another by living frugally and sharing the bounty of the land in the rural community of Comer, Georgia.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How the Blues Conquered Tokyo
I couldn’t quite figure out why Japanese listeners had come to appreciate and savor the blues in the way that they seemed to—lavishly, devotedly. Blues is still an outlier genre in Japan, but it’s revered, topical, present. I’d spent my first couple of days in Tokyo hungrily trawling the city’s many excellent record stores, marveling […]