Prose
COYOTES by Bill Burtis
Credit: wikimedia commons On a cold, crackling full-moon-lit night I clamp on skis and glide out across the solid reservoir before tracking up the pure moon-pearl slope of snowfield toward the dark curtain of trees and stop just short of the woods. Warmed in the climb, I survey the pale landscape the few intrepid stars […]
College Admissions Scandal As 1930s Screwball Comedy
By J. Cavanaugh Simpson — Depression-era screwball comedies skewered the shallow upper classes with satirical glee. Similar plot lines—updated and adjusted for inflation—offer timely social sabotage of college and class in the unfolding aftermath of the College Admissions Scandal. A few storylines that are, criminally, mostly three-quarters true: Charming conman Rich Slinger—mastermind of madcap slacker student admission scheme—secretly records entitled […]
LAST QUARTER MOON by Salvatore Difalco
Lately I’ve been getting dirty looks from people. Not just young people, though they are the worst offenders. Middle-aged people also shoot me dirty looks, and old people assume expressions of mild disgust. I wonder if it’s because I am a middle-aged white man. We’re disliked by many people these days, including members of our […]
THE SERVICE by Thomas N. Hackney
The Milky Way galaxy is estimated to contain 100-400 billion stars, the oldest of which are nearly as old as the universe itself. Half of the stars in our galaxy average 6.3 billion, with our sun checking in at 4.8 billion years old. An estimated 10 trillion galaxies populate the universe. Assuming an average of 100 billion […]
ON MOVING ON: A Tribute to Capital Gazette journalists
By Ann Costantino Several days ago marked the memorial service for John McNamara, the last of the five Capital Gazette newspaper employees killed about two weeks ago by Jarrod Ramos, whose misdirected rage was aimed squarely at unsuspecting employees who had nothing at all to do with his multi-year resentment toward the paper. The Gazette […]
The Godfather Speaks
I first met author Lee Gutkind at the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Summer Writers’ Conference at Goucher College when I was a grad student in the mid-1990s. The conference brought together some of the greatest practitioners of a literary form of nonfiction breaking new ground: creative nonfiction. Featured were authors Tracy Kidder. Susan Orlean. Gay Talese. Mary […]
The Trumpian Test
In this new era, what we mean by “mostly true” does not include how one leads a nation (via “alternative facts”). Here a commentary on what an actual disrespect for truth (versus a literary love for storytelling) could do to a society, and how it will test all of us . . . […]
THE SCIENCE AND ART OF STUFF by Bear Jack Gebhardt
I was skimming through the newspaper when I inadvertently glimpsed the fundamental nature of the universe—a glimpse of which physicists (and artists and poets) have been searching, and mostly missing, for millennia. I guess I was just in the right place at the right time. “To my mind,” wrote the noted physicist John Archibald Wheeler, […]
BLUES IN by Tom Larsen
The new releases at Rasputin’s Records were directly to the left of the checkout line. That’s where I first saw Art Pepper staring out from the cover of a Blue Note twofer. With those haunted eyes and sunken cheeks, he had the refried look of the nasty habit. Friends of ours back home had that […]
ABSOLUTES by Ingrid Jendrzejewski
He says the speed of light is an absolute, a universal physical constant: 299,792,458 meters per second, no more, no less, but then I say that’s nothing to how quickly my mind races when he’s away the way he is now, away in the night when I know-damn-well-know that he’s not still at work, that […]
3QR: The Three Quarter Review 