The caste system of Mexico held that there was racial mobility in miscegenation. A mestizo line could move forward to become Spanish after three generations of interbreeding with pure Spaniards, whereas mixing with Africans moved one back toward the pure African. Gary Winogrand’s Central Park Zoo photograph from 1967 plays on a buried notion […]
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faint hope for the Monarchs
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Blog
The Monarch figures for 2017 were released in February: down 1/3 from the previously year, which was only slightly better than the figures for 2014 and 2013, the lowest in at least 20 years, a decline of more than 80% in recent decades. According to a report in the New York Times by Michael Wines there […]
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Edna’s list
// dsaw_admin // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays, Travel Lessons
After my mother’s death at 83, I was surprised to find among her personal papers a frayed and folded magazine clipping entitled Wonders of the world. It consisted of two lists: one proclaiming the world’s ten greatest sights and the other hedging with another 25 runner-ups. The clipping was tucked into her pocket date […]
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why can’t I appreciate wine?
// dsaw_admin // All, Blog
I am a good cook and have a reasonably good palate. But I’ve never been able to identify very many flavors in wine and can never remember any of them. This has always been something of a mystery to me. Scent, like music, which I also can’t remember, seems totally ephemeral to me. It […]
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travel wars: us v. them
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Decoding Our Parents, Essays, Travel Lessons
To most, the sixties “generation gap” was a vague, pop-culture generality. To us—my parents on one side, my husband Michael and I on the other—it was my family’s defining motif. We were deeply, truly, madly split on every subject. Police brutality. Dean Martin. Grey Poupon versus French’s. It was all equally significant. Where you […]
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the 7 Wonders: lost and found
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Blog
By the end of the Roman Era, all the Wonders except the pyramids had disappeared and only the idea of a List of Seven Wonders survived. For several hundred years no record existed of the original list’s makeup, though new lists continued to be developed. In the early 1500s, after Antipater’s poem had come […]
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travel fantasy undone
// Elizabeth Marcus // All, Essays, Travel Lessons
By the time I was a midlife wife and mother, I knew the Age of Exploration had long since passed, and yet I still craved a sense of discovery—and of self-discovery—when I traveled. The word “trip” continued to have a ‘60’s ring. Over the years, I’d come to realize that what I sought was […]
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Reluctant Baccante
// dsaw_admin // All, Essays, Travel Lessons
“A few days sipping wine in he California sunshine—how bad could it be?” my husband coaxed. “The kids are in camp. It’s our chance to get away!” I let myself be persuaded. For years we’d heard glowing reports from friends who’d been enticed by Napa’s siren song. But I am here to report that […]
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the tradition of blood feuds
// dsaw_admin // All, Blog
From a distance, a blood feud—in which two families commit to decades of mutual hate and revenge killing—seems like a form of madness. In America, it became a famous bit of our early history through its appearance in literature; or did it make it into literature because it was so famous? The Hatfield and McCoy feud, at the […]
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twin studies and sibling rivalry
// dsaw_admin // All, Blog
Why are some twins so close as to develop something approximating a private language (called idioglossia or cryptophasia) while others are connected only by animosity? For a look-alike conversation between infant twins see this very funny clip. Are identical twins close more often than fraternal twins? If so, does this suggest that the determining […]