Video: Nora Brown plays two old-time banjo tunes
In a mesmerizing set, musician Nora Brown breathes new life into two old-time banjo tunes: “East Virginia” and “John Brown’s Dream.” An evocative performance paired with a quick history of the banjo’s evolution.
Sandy Solomon: Poison
The red-faced guard, his scant hair pressed like a wish against his boney pate, sat uniformed at the library gate sternly blocking the un-elect like me. After just a … Continue reading
Robert Gibb: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
“Sharecropper’s Work Shoes” —Photo by Walker Evans, 1936 . The Magritte who took issue with the ordinary Would have tipped them with toes. Evans, deferential, simply sets them before … Continue reading
Robert Gibb: Home Scrap Project — Unemployed Steel Worker, 1987-1988
for Ramon Elouza . Close-ups in an eye-level lineup, His photographed faces hung on their wall, Each behind lines of writing, well I lost my job my wife and … Continue reading
Jon Tribble: Missionary Barrel
for my father Like a loose plank on a flatbed Ford skittering and shimmying the bolt free, your life has shaken out the cotton fields in Limestone County, the … Continue reading
Chris Hedges: Diseases of Despair
The opioid crisis, the frequent mass shootings, the rising rates of suicide, especially among middle-aged white males, the morbid obesity, the obsession with gambling, the investment of our emotional and … Continue reading
Chris Hedges: How ‘Antifa’ Mirrors the ‘Alt-Right’
Editor’s note: A Berkeley, Calif., rally organized by a right-wing group turned violent Sunday after arrival of a group that carried an anarchist banner. Behind the rhetoric of the “alt-right” … Continue reading
Jon Tribble: 38,000,000 Reasons
I had left the Colonel and his kitchen behind for good and was detoxing as a movie theater usher in the last of my senior year of high school, but … Continue reading
Joshua Wilkey: Blessed are the White Trash
I grew up poor. Often, when one reads memoirs or oral histories from folks who grew up where I did — that is, in Appalachia, or in the South, or somewhere … Continue reading
Video: The Curse and the Jubilee
. Directed by Ivete Lucas and Otis Lee, The Curse and the Jubilee is an intimate, arresting portrait of the cursed Appalachian mining town of Ivanhoe, Virginia. The film captures the … Continue reading
