Archive for the ‘The Wide World’ Category


Where the Quilt is kept

Inside the NAMES Project Foundation headquarters, where the AIDS Memorial Quilt is stored: This corner is for quilt panels that have not yet been combined with others to make the enormous quilt squares (composed of eight panels, each of which is 3 feet by 6 feet). The squares are about as tall, when complete, as [...]

January 31st, 2012

Visiting the AIDS Memorial Quilt

The squares are bigger than you could even imagine. They command the room, the space. What a powerful source of memory, of honoring those who we have lost to AIDS. As I have written about a few times already , I have been exploring the many squares on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and have been remembering [...]

January 23rd, 2012

But time makes you older

At one of my favorite childhood places, the children’s wing of the Dickinson County Library in Iron Mountain, Michigan, I have two specific memories. One is a compilation of the many hours I spent sitting in the carpet-lined claw-foot bathtub someone had brilliantly installed there, making it suddenly the most fun place to read a book. The [...]

January 21st, 2012

Cities. And earth. And living rooms in Seoul.

“It starts with looking at growing cities in a positive way–not as diseases, but as concentrations of human energy to be organized and tapped.”   This series of photos accompanies the article I mention here, on urban living and the future of the planet. They are photographs of families in Seoul, South Korea, in their identical [...]

January 13th, 2012

Paris by my eye, 2005

I took French in high school over Spanish for a singular reason: West Laurens actually had a sister city in France, and did an exchange program every other year. In my junior year, my family hosted two French teenage boys in our home for a week, and then the people of Gerardmer, France returned the [...]

January 9th, 2012

2011 [a year like no other] and its place in history

I have read two articles in the last week whose arguments have begun with Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay The End of History, which argued that as we reached the final demise of the U.S.S.R., “liberal democracy had triumphed and become the undisputed evolutionary end point toward which every national system was inexorably moving: fundamental political ferment was over [...]

December 27th, 2011

Among reindeer

Nils Peder kneels among his reindeer This week I have finally been able to open my October and November issues of National Geographic and I was awestruck by the November story on the Sami people of northern Sweden. Their wardrobe and striking faces radiate against the harsh landscape of the region where they live–blanketed all [...]

November 22nd, 2011

Telling stories without paper: human voices and created objects

Incidentally, the third class I’m taking this semester is Exhibit Planning and Production, and we are designing an exhibit to go in cases like this one, in Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, in their E Terminal. Without realizing it earlier, this semester I am in two courses that I have been extremely excited to take, and that [...]

August 31st, 2011

Tell it right, and a western can make me cry.

I have always been a sucker for a good story. The simplest tale, told in the right way, brings me to tears. It is almost silly how often I have found myself sitting in the movie theater at the end of a great film, or even a mediocre one, and suddenly, some small trigger in the narrative, [...]

June 23rd, 2011

Instead of reading for class…

… I’ve been reading a good old travelogue, like those which sustained my interest for a few years, when I first discovered the Travel Essays section of the bookstore, until I realized that mostly, that shelf does not have new releases very often, and I had read all the best ones already. The rest, I [...]

June 12th, 2011