Cribbage is a Family Game
Bagging the muggins with Penelope
Take that, you pig-fuckers
Old age is no country for young men
Over the past two decades, I have played thousands upon thousands of cribbage games, the overwhelming majority of them against my pops. At this point in our lives, cribbage has become the most agreeable way we can relate to each other, a 20-minute sanctuary where hard topics like politics, my life goals and aspirations, and his memory losses become comfortingly irrelevant. All that matters is pegs in a board.
My pops taught me the arcane rules of cribbage when I was around ten years old, and I have done my best to spread the gospel ever since. This task is something of an uphill battle given the popular consensus that cribbage is an “old man’s game.” At my age, at least, a good cribbage partner can be hard to find.
Most people (unless they, too, were taught by their father or mother or uncle or grandad) shy away from the laundry list of rules, the three different stages of the game, and the …
The Cleopatra of the Race-Track
Works by pioneering 19th century African American artist appear in strange places
Marble bust of Christ recovered from closet in Scottish castle: ’Old Arrowmaker’ recovered from Québec City junk shop.
Historical Society of Forest Park, Ill. preserves statue of Nilotic Queen using unorthodox techniques
Edmonia Lewis has faded so far into obscurity that, until a few years ago, experts had no idea when the African American and indigenous sculptor died, where she was buried, or what had happened to the more than 100 marble pieces she created.
The handful of working Lewis sleuths — the academics, conservators, and art aficionados who have devoted their careers to tracking her work — have only recently uncovered some of the most basic details of her life and death. Lewis belonged to a coterie of American expatriate women sculptors in Rome, where she went to live in 1865, and never married. She was born in East Greenbush, New York, to an Ojibwe mother and Haitian father. An older half brother, Samuel Lewis, struck it rich in the California gold rush and financed her art studies at Oberlin College.
Lewis, who had faced intense discrimination and a near-lynching at Oberlin after she was accused of …
Crime Blotter: Ivy League Edition
The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT, whose names are — or hopefully by the time of this publication, were — Claudine Gay, Elizabeth Magill, and Sally Kornbluth, respectively, testified before Congress that mobs of masked students and professors calling for the genocide of Jews “from the river to the sea” is definitely not a form of harassment or even a microaggression but rather a form of free speech that all Americans should be proud of. Presidents Hear No Evil, See No Evil, and Speak No Evil further testified that refusing admission to high-scoring Asian students is in no way a form of race-based discrimination; hiring professors and administrators on the basis of their race and political viewpoints is in no way discriminatory; raping people with disfavored national identities or political leanings is not rape; silencing …
