Cribbage is a Family Game

Featurette

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 unfamiliar board on which the score is kept. The game is most frequently played between two …

Report

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

By Isabel Vincent

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 poisoning two white housemates (she was acquitted at trial in 1863), enjoyed success and …

Cribbage is a Family Game

The Cleopatra of the Race-Track

Critic's Corner