Automattic

Writing is not farming or surgery or road construction, but it isn’t easy either. Rejection stings. It undermines, and it’s unavoidable. When a talented, respected memoirist attends a literary event with a poet who left a painful mark on her, she reconciles with her past and questions not only what sort of marks she’s left […]

After WWII, Russian forces occupied east Germany. The soldiers and their barracks became part of the fabric of life, though still separate from it, as was the forced camaraderie between citizens of each nation, “the sort acted out at parades rather than genuinely felt.” Here’s what one child’s life was like in occupied Germany beside […]

You can learn a lot from a Missouri Bass Pro Shop about white America’s misperceptions and fantasies about the Osage Nation, if you’re really looking.

A response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “My President Was Black” from sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom: “My first black president seems to think he can have black cool without black burden. For all his intimacies with his white mother and white grandparents, my first black president doesn’t appear to know his whites.”

The story of how Google’s developed artificial intelligence to vastly improve its translation service, Google Translate, and what machine learning might be able to do in the near future.

How the Golden State Warriors coach’s worldview was shaped by his family’s time in Beirut and the assassination of his father, Malcolm Kerr, while serving as the president of American University of Beirut in 1984.

Even now, as someone who has lived in Toronto for almost two decades, I cannot shake the Quebec out of me. Both professionally and socially, I notice that my human bonds grow fastest and strongest with other members of the Quebec diaspora. Those multiply nested countercultures seem to give us a unique outlook on life—a […]

The difference between hope and optimism, and the dangers of activism without a plan.

For many of us who celebrate Christmas, foods are as closely bound to the experience as gift-giving. And making fun of fruitcake has become a time-honored tradition — though thanks to the success of this dedicated fruitcake besmirchment campaign, I suspect many of us have never actually tasted, let alone received or re-gifted, a traditional […]

A look at the work of Robert Jensen, who has built an unusual (and successful) career cleaning up after mass fatalities, from identifying bodies to returning personal belongings to families of the dead.