John Murphy

Jul 15, 2024 | spectrumculture.com | John Murphy

Reinhold Messner’s name graced a 1999 album by Ben Folds Five. But even then, coincidence—the exact moniker was used by the drummer when underage on a fake I.D.—rather than tribute proved why. This unconventional mountaineer, all the same, shared the “alternative” cred of his peers among the two-dozen explorers whose legendary exploits inspired the team of Scott and Tarantino to follow their footsteps across the globe.

Jun 28, 2024 | spectrumculture.com | John Murphy

In English, “peasant” lacks the camaraderie inherent in, say, the Italian “paisano.” The snide put-down of John Lennon, a descendent of Ireland’s rural majority, with its over-familiar copulative gerund as adjective, precedes our language’s term in his song “Working Class Hero.” What’s hinted at in the juxtaposition of the two class-bound descriptors: the grounding between the stereotyped backward folks working the land and those surrounding him in his native Liverpool.

May 10, 2024 | spectrumculture.com | John Murphy

Manhattan derives from the Lenape for the “place where wood for bows is gathered.” Its Dutch pioneering tradesman Peter Stuyvesant, however, spoke Frisian as his first language. From the 18 tongues we know were indigenous to this island in the Hudson, New York City today harbors at least 700 of the world’s 7,000 languages.

Jan 25, 2024 | komu.com | John Murphy

A major priority of Parson's proposed budget is to raise the baseline salary of Missouri teachers to $40,000, up from $38,000.

Jan 19, 2024 | spectrumculture.com | John Murphy

A musicologist at U.S.C., Joanna Demers’ research delves into post-1945 aesthetics, experimental and pop genres and intellectual property law’s impacts on creativity. With this background, one might expect her fiction to dramatize life as a professor, at the intersection between mass media and specialized scholarship.