Christopher Carlisle

Backstory of Rosecliff Mansion “Rosecliff was not the grandest of the mansions. And this was part of its charisma. On a street that held dream after dream of nineteenth-century robber barons, who had come to believe in their monarchies in an unfortunately democratic state, its graceful restraint in the company of The Breakers and Marble […]

Backstory of Pickett’s church in Ashfield, Massachusetts As perplexed as I am about the beauty of wealth and the ugliness of greed, beneath this paradox, l think I’ve come to know a beauty greater than them both. Having grown up with the embarrassing assumption that privilege is “a gift from God,” the decision to become

Backstory of Paris “If Paris didn’t exist in the world, it would have to be invented. Something hangs in the burnished air that presumes its preeminence, as if to suggest that nothing on earth could have stopped this incarnation. In an otherwise hopelessly random world, there was nothing random about Paris—as sightseers’ eyes from Togo