I traveled to rural Tennessee to cover a uniquely American shopping experience: a yard sale, annually held over the first weekend in early August, that spans some 675 miles of one highway. It’s called, not undeservedly, the World’s Longest Yard Sale.
We can feel comfortable that the Chinese are unlikely to covet this world record and swipe it from us, partly because they made most of the junk for sale at this one.
Johnny Carson invited his best guests to sit on the couch. Jon Stewart invites his best guests for extended interviews to “throw online.” I tweeted this thought a month ago. But Twitter is like a great trash compactor for complicated thoughts: It compresses them, it grinds them into something you can flush away, and it… Read more »
Here’s what’s going to happen. Some gay kids are going to start realizing they weren’t gay after all. Most sexually questioning teenagers, even in the most conservative high schools, make friends with the misfit girl who appreciates both his plight and the fact he’s not a sexual threat to her. And the minute a young… Read more »
I think Thomas Jefferson’s gravestone is weird. First of all, the well-wishers throw a lot of pennies on it. You’d think more people would toss nickels on Thomas Jefferson’s grave. After all, Thomas’s head, which is on the face of the nickel, lies just feet below the stone, and the image of his slavemanse Monticello,… Read more »
Today I visited Rosewood, Florida, a town with a past so tangled that its historical marker requires two sides to tell it. That sign is pretty much all there is to tell the story. That’s because Rosewood was erased. It was torched by racists in 1923. The tale is as convoluted as it is painful,… Read more »
We obsess over the deaths of individuals. When one notable person dies, or when one person dies notably, we imbue that person with our fears, with idealizations of our better nature, or with a rueful but unspoken gratitude of “there but for the grace of God go I.” But when we die in batches, we… Read more »
You’re going to think I’m nuts. But I’m growing convinced: The Web has trashed the American economy. Back in the ’20s, mass production transformed the way we made and bought things. Henry Ford and his magnate brethren learned how to make vast quantities of consumer items quickly, and to sell those consumer items, they had… Read more »
It happened on March 25, but there had been warnings for years. Factory owners across America amassed fortunes by exploiting what was, at the time, a seemingly inexhaustible resource: immigrants. Newly arrived Europeans were expendable. They had a weak political voice, so crossing them had little negative impact for politicians and none for businessmen, since… Read more »
The government doesn’t pay much attention to making sure we can get where we need to go. Subway lines are falling apart, buses infrequent, train systems decimated, and high-speed rail has been politicized into a fantasy. The ways in which we suffer extend far beyond mere inconvenience. In America, getting there is not considered a… Read more »
One of the fascinating things about studying American history is that it’s so full of contradictions. In order for a country of our size and variety to cohere at all, we require a group acceptance of some pretty romantic mythology. And often, the real story is a lot uglier than the prettified conventional wisdom we’re… Read more »