Automattic

S.I. Newhouse’s contentious appointment of Robert Gottlieb as the editor of The New Yorker in 1987, and what Gottlieb did to bring the magazine into a new era: “Orlean was an early Gottlieb-era hire. ‘She came in off the street,’ said McGrath, her Talk of the Town editor (though, she noted, Gottlieb was often her […]

On the origins of The Great Gatsby and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s desire to “be one of the greatest writers who have ever lived”: “In October 1922, Fitzgerald moved his family (Zelda plus their two-year-old daughter, Scottie) to Great Neck, Long Island and over the next 18 months ‘my novel’ acquired a Midwestern background, a poor […]

Grief counselors at Archbishop Moeller High School, an all-boys school, work with teens who have lost loved ones: “Phillip begins to speak even more in this session. He says his father died of heart failure which was a result of quadriplegia. The death was not expected, he says, but it was not a surprise. He […]

Last week, the below YouTube video resurfaced on Twitter to remind me about everything I loved, and still love, about Mr. Rogers. It’s a clip from the 1997 Daytime Emmys, where Fred McFeely Rogers accepted a Lifetime Achievement Award:

Jason Everman was kicked out of both Nirvana and Soundgarden, before the bands went on to sell millions of albums. He then decided to do something completely different: “So in 1993, while living in a group house in San Francisco with the guys in Mindfunk, Everman slipped out to meet with recruiters; the Army offered […]

Last February, a Washington Redskins executives said on a team talk show that 70 different high schools across the country share the NFL franchise’s controversial name. University of Maryland journalism graduate student Kelyn Soong did a little fact checking.

Fifty years ago, a microbiologist named Leonard Hayflick developed a strain of cells named WI-38 from the lungs of an aborted fetus. The strain of cells have been used to produce life-savings vaccines worldwide, but have also had a history riddled with controversy: “The cells have played ‘a very critical role in studying cellular senescence,’ […]

The writer embeds with the Hotshots, an elite group of wilderness firefighters, for a season: “At 11 P.M., the crew hooks over the top of the spot and starts building line down the eastern flank and back toward the creek. Rojas is mowing through the brush when a flare-up sends a wash of embers overhead. […]

[NSFW] A look back at Bruce Lee’s early career and the making of Enter the Dragon. (One of Lee’s costars, Jim Kelly, died Saturday at age 67): “Enter the Dragon struck a responsive chord across the globe. Made for a minuscule $850,000, it would gross $90 million worldwide in 1973 and go on to earn […]

The writer remembers her mother and the garden she loved: “At the height of summer my mother would clip the most luxurious marigolds that she had successfully grown from seed, handfuls of intense yellow bobbing in the hot wind, reaching above her waist. She’d dip them in wax so that they would outlast the season, […]