Almost all of us have home movies of our families somewhere, from the flickering black and white of 8-millimeter film to the Instagramable perfection of an iPhone video. We like to think of them as a kind of homespun cinema … Read more
I decided to try another “theme” week on Storyboard, after having such fun with the Southern focus last week. For this one, we took a look at controversial stories, books, writers and themes. From D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” to Alex … Read more
The story of the woman called Lola begins and ends with ashes. Ashes that “filled a plastic box about the size of a toaster.” Ashes sheltered in a canvas tote bag from a suburb north of tech-hip Seattle to a … Read more
The article “Who Killed Julian Pierce?” was unusual on at least three counts. It was the author’s first magazine story. It took nearly 30 years to write. And it came close to solving a murder. “I thought a … Read more
Marion Abrahams-Welsh grew up with four generations of her family on hilly Sheppard Street in the Cape Town neighborhood known as District Six. Fourteen of them shared a small home filled with love and possibility, even though they had little … Read more
Sometimes the idea for a book springs from what you don’t know. David Grann had never heard of the “Osage Murders” until a historian he was talking to mentioned the series of mysterious deaths among members of the wealthy Osage … Read more
I was almost afraid to read “My President Was Black.” Ta-Nehisi Coates is such a tour de force, I was afraid that his words would wipe away my thoughts, his insights obliterate my voice as I try to sort out … Read more
At a time of intense racial tensions in the United States – tensions that visited my own college campus last year – I ran across a story that stopped me in my tracks. In “This Is What They … Read more