Josh Reno

✽ We both recall the exact moment when we heard that U.S. anthropologist and activist David Graeber had died in Venice, Italy, at the age of 59. I (Holly) remember the cold of the brown leather sofa where I was sitting. I was at home in the chilly highlands south of Sydney and felt my phone buzz. “I just wondered if you saw that,” read the text from a former student. I clicked on the article link they’d sent. My first reaction was denial. “Is this a hoax?” I shot back, slightly irritated.

✽ A desolate windswept field, bisected by a two-lane road, fills the television screen. The camera pans over a man’s dusty hat on the seat of a truck, the tip of his cowboy boot, then up to a pair of grain silos, and finally to a tiny clapboard Christian church. A gravelly masculine voice intones, “There’s a chapel in Kansas, standing on the exact center of the lower 48.” Swaying wheat stalks move through the frame, light filtering through their silhouetted branches.

I'm currently in the middle of remodeling hell and needed info on sealing granite. I'm not sure she has any idea what she's talking about but she's got a captive audience.