On January 15, 1929, in the bedroom his parents shared in his grandparents’ house on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Michael Luther King Jr. was born. No, Michael is not a typo. It wasn’t until 1934, upon his return from a globe-spanning journey that had taken him from Paris and Rome to Cairo, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where he was a delegate…
Donald Judd (1928-1994) was one of the founders of Minimal art, a movement in which art was stripped down to pure form and proportion, no longer representing anything at all, but simply existing as an elegantly conceived, often geometrically simple object. Judd lived his art, designing geometric furniture and pure living spaces for himself and his family, filtering out all…
Nelson Mandela enjoyed such a long twilight that it’s easy to forget what a threatening figure he once cut—not just in South Africa but in the United States, where he was routinely condemned as a Communist terrorist. In 1985 William F. Buckley wrote: “where Mandela belongs…is precisely where he is: in jail.” Mandela made no bones about being a revolutionary;…
I’m at one end of the couch, my 88-year-old father at the other in the living room of his condo in Fountain Hills, Arizona. We could easily pass for strangers, but not because of our limited contact since he moved here from New Jersey 28 years ago. Encroaching dementia has estranged my father from me as well as from himself.…
When I start to get overwhelmed and anxious, I have found that stepping out of my overscheduled life for a “haiku walk” can rewire my day. Traditionally, Japanese haiku walks are called gingkos, named after the tree, and are held in a place of historical or cultural significance or in an area of natural beauty. I live in Moscow, Russia,…
w/Rose, Dr. Richard Ash, Gaby Bernstein & Tevis Trower
