In this 2014 piece for Der Spiegel, Claudia Voigt looks at the life of Astrid Lindgren, a Swedish author best known for her Pippi Longstocking books. If you haven’t revisited the books recently, the exuberant Pippi lives on her own, does as she pleases, and describes herself as “the strongest girl in the world.” In short, she’s a […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
When Your Lost Phone Ends Up in Yemen
In the summer of 2013, a New York yuppie lost her iPhone in the Hamptons. A few months later, she got an alert saying that her phone had been turned on in Yemen, and then candid pictures of a Yemeni family started filling her iCloud account. The phone was soon updated under the name of its new owner, a teenager […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
When Your Lost Phone Ends Up in Yemen
In the summer of 2013, a New York yuppie lost her iPhone in the Hamptons. A few months later, she got an alert saying that her phone had been turned on in Yemen, and then candid pictures of a Yemeni family started filling her iCloud account. The phone was soon updated under the name of its new owner, a teenager […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Drawing Parallels Between Elon Musk and the Wright Brothers
There are a number of suggestive parallels between [Elon] Musk and the Wrights, beyond the obvious ones to do with an interest in flight. The [Wright brothers’ father] had very high standards and set no limits on the intellectual curiosity he encouraged in his children; Musk’s father had the same standards and the same insistence on […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Why the Church of Scientology Can’t Beat the Internet
Over at The Kernel, Jesse Hicks has put together a fascinating account of the Church of Scientology’s relationship with the Internet. So, how has a notoriously secretive and hierarchical organization dealt with the world’s most “open and radically nonhierarchical platform for communication”? Not well. Scientology’s antagonistic relationship to the Internet dates back to the web’s early days: when an early […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Etgar Keret on Why Yom Kippur Has Always Been His Favorite Holiday
Yom Kippur was always my favorite holiday. Even in nursery school, when all the other kids liked Purim because of the costumes, Hanukkah because of the latkes, and Passover because of the long vacation, I was hooked on Yom Kippur. If holidays were like kids, I once thought when I was still a boy, then […]
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A Very Brief History of Americans Playing Softball with Their Co-Workers
Americans have been playing softball with their co-workers since the game grew out of several variants of baseball in the late 19th century. In 1895, Louis Rober, a lieutenant in the Minneapolis fire department, organized games of “kittenball” to entertain firefighters between runs. Blue-collar company teams proliferated over the next half-century. Office workers joined in later, […]
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‘Firsts,’ ‘Lasts,’ and ‘Onlys’ at the International Music Feed
Over at Noisey, Lisa Mrock has written a wonderfully personal requiem for a short-lived TV channel called the International Music Feed. The music video-based television network in question only existed for three years (from 2005 to 2008), but it made quite an impact during its brief tenure: In an age where hardly anything is original, the International Music […]
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C.J. Chivers’ Particular Brand of War Journalism
The Times hired Chivers at age thirty-four in 1999 to cover war. That was the handshake, he says. A former Marine officer, he might know how to handle himself in a war zone, the paper figured. What the Times could not have known was that Chivers would develop a brand of journalism unique in the world for, among other […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
On Graywolf Press and the Lyric Essay
Over at New York magazine, Boris Kachka has a piece looking at how the tiny, Minnesota-based Graywolf Press became a major player in book publishing. As the publisher of books like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (read the first chapter here!) and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Graywolf Press has helped turn “the previously unprepossessing genre of the ‘lyric essay’ into a major […]