Michael Simms: All Time Most Popular Posts in Vox Populi (2014-2025)
Vox Populi was founded on April 1, 2014 when Nisha Gupta and I met for coffee and decided to start a website to support the anti-fracking activists in Western Pennsylvania.
Baron Wormser: Groovy
It’s fair to say that “groovy” has passed out of daily parlance. As words go, it was a bit silly, a bit mystic, a bit glib, a bit droll, a bit low-brow, a bit artless, and a bit wonderful. It spoke to an era and seemed, accordingly, germane to that era and almost sensible in its glad frankness.
Askold Melnyczuk: The Enamel Box
The father smokes a pipe, instructs the child:
“Cultivate wheat and a conscience.
In a pinch, forfeit
the conscience
but save that wheat.”
Video: Shé (Snake)
Fei, a 16 year old British-Chinese girl, is the top violinist in an elite youth orchestra. When another Chinese violinist arrives to challenge her place, Fei’s anxieties and internalized racism grow to take monstrous physical form. They whisper to her, urging her to be the best, no matter the cost.
Alison Luterman: What I Learned
singing’s made of sweat and spittle,
tears and snot, hot breath,
and the soggy crumb of a potato chip left
in a back corner of your unflossed tooth
Video: American Seams | The Plains
The stories of three quilters combine to reveal an intimate portrait of rural women in the American West. Featuring Brenda Bailey, Sara Buscaglia, and Susan “Traditional Woman” Hudson.
Video: Mississippi John Hurt | Spike Driver’s Blues
Mississippi John Hurt used a syncopated finger picking style of guitar playing that he taught himself. According to the music critic Robert Christgau, “No one else has talked the blues with such delicacy or restraint.”
Jianqing Zheng: Site Visit
The Valley Store in Avalon, Mississippi, long abandoned, still holds its worn-out sign above the locked double doors. Many years ago, John Hurt lived nearby.
Bob Dylan: Nobel Lecture
When awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, Bob Dylan gave no comment for two weeks, ignored the Academy’s calls, didn’t attend the ceremony, and collected the award in a hoodie four months later. But Dylan later sent them a rambling, 27-minute ode to literature.
Mike Schneider: Stirring Up the “Great Folk Scare”
There’s nothing easy-going about the folk songs of the Greenwich Village revival, not the ones Dylan sang — a man-killing woman, catastrophic floods, a man driven insane by love — songs that taught him there’s nothing new on Earth.
Video: Do You Want To Go Down This Way, Or Go Back The Way We Came?
A new film elegy by Bryan Konefsky that uses the lens of loss and grief to explore intersections between memory and artifact.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Talking with My Daughter about Grief
We lie in the dark
and speak about anything
but what I ache to speak about.
Video: Crying Glacier (2024)
A sound artist tries to conserve the sounds of a melting glacier in the Swiss Alps before it might disappear forever.
Video: Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer
Grandma got run over by a reindeer
Walking home from our house Christmas Eve.
You can say there’s no such thing as Santa,
But as for me and Grandpa, we believe.
