Berkeley Breathed is responsible for one of the more delightful things to happen to my Facebook feed in some time: The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, who created “Bloom County” and characters like Opus the penguin, has revived his beloved comic strip after a 25-year hiatus, posting new installments on his Facebook page. In a new interview […]
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Posted inBlog Post, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews
Can a Company Really Disrupt Itself? Roger Hodge on Zappos and Holacracy
Roger Hodge went inside Zappos for his October 2015 in the The New Republic, investigating CEO Tony Hsieh’s radical decision to eliminate management and fully embrace the concept of Holacracy at the online shoe retailer.
Posted inBlog Post, Books, Nonfiction
The Genius of Marie Kondo and the Evolution of Decluttering
In 1881, Eunice White Bullard published All Around the House, Or, How to Make Homes Happy, a 468-page manual on everything a head of household needed to know to keep things in order. Bullard, the wife of Henry Ward Beecher, dedicated chapters to everything from managing laundry to pickling, washing flannel, and cooking a goose.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
On DJ Kool Herc and a Seminal Moment in Hip-Hop History
Journalist Jeff Chang’s 2005 book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop offers a history of hip-hop culture, and he’s particularly good at capturing the 1970s Bronx neighborhood party scene that helped start it all, with a young Jamaican-born DJ named Clive Campbell—who moved to the Bronx with his family as a child and soon started hosting parties as […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Heather Matarazzo on the Childhood Search for Her Biological Parents
Heather Matarazzo, who made her film breakthrough in 1995’s Welcome to the Dollhouse and has appeared on shows including Grey’s Anatomy, is now blogging about her life and her experiences in Hollywood. Her latest piece is a deeply personal one, about the curiosity and fear that came with secretly searching for her biological parents: I’m […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
E.L. Doctorow: 1931-2015
INTERVIEWER Isn’t there an enormous temptation as a fiction writer to take scenes out of history, since you do rely on that so much, and fiddle with them just a little bit? DOCTOROW Well, it’s nothing new, you know. I myself like the way Shakespeare fiddles with history; and Tolstoy. In this country we tend […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
Marilynne Robinson on Writing and Discipline
INTERVIEWER Do you keep to a schedule? ROBINSON I really am incapable of discipline. I write when something makes a strong claim on me. When I don’t feel like writing, I absolutely don’t feel like writing. I tried that work ethic thing a couple of times—I can’t say I exhausted its possibilities—but if there’s not […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Dr. V’ Writer Caleb Hannan Speaks for the First Time About What Went Wrong
“It didn’t need to exist. And that was not something that occurred to me in the process of reporting.” Out of everyone who read an early draft of “Dr. V’s Magical Putter,” only Caleb Hannan’s wife asked him the most critical question of all: Did this story even need to exist? Hannan spoke publicly for […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Should You Keep Having Sex During a 9.0 Earthquake, and Other Pressing Questions
If you’ve been too scared to read this week’s New Yorker story on the apocalyptic earthquake that’s threatening to destroy the Pacific Northwest, here’s a lighter take from Dan Savage, who had a short conversation with Seattle author Sandi Doughton about her 2014 book Full-Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest and […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Taking A Different Approach to Kids and Bad Behavior
Writer Katherine Reynolds Lewis, in Mother Jones, examines the latest approaches to addressing children and discipline—most notably, that timeouts, negative consequences, and other traditional punishments might not be as effective in many cases as helping kids manage their own emotions. It’s based on “Collaborative and Proactive Solutions,” a program that was developed by psychologist Ross […]