I was twenty-three and living three blocks from the dome of the U.S. Capitol—or, as my dad soon took to calling it, “the Bull’s Eye of the Western world” —on September 11, 2001. When the plane hit the second tower, I watched the impact on a scratchy analog TV from my desk at my first…

Last week, the New York Times carried a story about President Obama on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. Not hard news—far from it—the story offered assembled tidbits of press coverage as reporters hung out at local bars and T-shirt shops and golf courses hoping for views of POTUS. Two tidbits in particular struck me: Obama, unlike…

My father is a therapist. This has made for an (how should I say this?), ummm, interesting life. Yes, that’s it. The word I want here is interesting. When my father wanted to provoke me growing up, he would say things like, “I’m sensing some hostility from you. Let’s explore that” or “Kelly, how does…

There’s one thing these days that it seems you can get everyone to agree on, whatever their political or cultural stripe: They all hate Washington, DC. One of my brothers is a stockbroker and a free-market conservative; the other is a reliably Democratic art director (who has donated to the local ACLU auction), and yet…

With a pregnant wife, a high school chemistry teacher’s salary, a sinkhole of debt, and a teenage son suffering from cerebral palsy, Walter White is pushed to the limits of composure. The focus of AMC’s original series Breaking Bad, Walt (Bryan Cranston) must also abide insolent students and obnoxious in-laws. It’s enough to make anyone…

Nobody stops in Bucyrus, Ohio unless they have to. Columbus, the big-city capital, is an hour and a half to the south. Cedar Point Amusement Park, the preferred destination for roller coaster enthusiasts, is an hour and a half to the north. The Lincoln Highway, US 30, which bisects the country from New York to…

Nobody stops in Bucyrus, Ohio unless they have to. Columbus, the big-city capital, is an hour and a half to the south. Cedar Point Amusement Park, the preferred destination for roller coaster enthusiasts, is an hour and a half to the north. The Lincoln Highway, US 30, which bisects the country from New York to…

If you’re like me, you like listening to music all the time. And if you’re like me, you are also now in a graduate program in language and literacy education, which means you do not have time to do anything except read incomprehensible books about sociocultural theories of language. Perhaps you are not exactly like…

Philosophers don’t usually make good rock ’n rollers. Philosophers write dense, convoluted, esoteric arguments about highly theoretical concepts; a prospect that typically doesn’t elicit much wild abandon out on the dance floor. So you have to tip your scholar’s cap to Tonio K. The 70s rocker was as deeply indebted to twentieth-century existentialist art and…

Back from an unannounced (and unforeseen) hiatus in blogging, I have so many ideas accumulated that I don’t know which to focus on. So here are brief mentions of various articles that have piled up over the last few weeks, all of which deal with artists who have worked within the “pile up” as Annie…