Tag: Elvis

  • Elvis Never Left the Building

    Elvis Never Left the Building

    Almost fifty years after his death, Elvis Presley remains the centre of an extraordinary international devotion. From candlelit pilgrimages to Graceland to thousands of impersonators across the world, what explains the enduring cult of the King? In August 2026, an eighteen-year-old from Missouri was crowned the world’s ultimate Elvis tribute artist. Finley Watkins, the youngest…

  • Elvis Presley and His Cadillacs: Chrome, Dreams, and the King of the Open Road

    Elvis Presley and His Cadillacs: Chrome, Dreams, and the King of the Open Road

    Elvis Presley’s rise from Tupelo poverty to international superstardom is a story often told in gold records and rhinestone jumpsuits. But just as iconic as his taste in tat were the cars he drove—most famously, the Cadillacs that came to symbolize his success, generosity, and flair for style. In the 1950s and 1960s, Cadillac was…

  • The Companion Who Lives in Your Head: Imaginary Friends, Spirit Guides, and the Inner Life of the Boy

    The Companion Who Lives in Your Head: Imaginary Friends, Spirit Guides, and the Inner Life of the Boy

    An Essay on Reading Great Are the Myths “What if you’re my imaginary friend?” The boy asks this near the very end. They are lying side by side on sun loungers in the California desert, covered in blankets, the way they used to lie in the garden in Memphis when they were thirteen and fourteen…

  • The Two Alfreds: Eisenstaedt and Wertheimer

    The Two Alfreds: Eisenstaedt and Wertheimer

    In the vast history of twentieth-century photography, two Alfreds stand out for the way they captured the essence of their time: Alfred Eisenstaedt, the German-born émigré whose elegant eye helped define Life magazine’s golden era, and Alfred Wertheimer, the Brooklyn-based photographer whose intimate portraits of a young Elvis Presley gave the world its first candid…