A personal essay in which Jessica Brown reflects on reading sociologist Ray Oldenburg’s, The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community, and walking the streets of her much gentrified adopted city seeking deeper connection.
Sari Botton
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Men Explain Sylvia Plath’s Suffering to Us
Emily Van Duyne wonders why Sylvia Plath’s accounts of Ted Hughes’s violence toward her have been so frequently dismissed or minimized.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Why Are We So Unwilling to Take Sylvia Plath at Her Word?
A critical essay raising the question of why many in the literary world cast doubt or treat lightly Sylvia Plath’s allegations of serious abuse at the hand of her husband, poet Ted Hughes — who destroyed many of his wife’s journals from the period before her suicide. Much of her ordeal came to light in […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
My Grandfather’s Fateful Goodbye, Reimagined
A personal essay in which Karissa Chen tries to reconstruct the moment her grandfather, at 19, left Shanghai for Taiwan on a supposed vacation — a decision that would alter his life forever.
Posted inCrime, Nonfiction, Quotes
Kingston’s Little Shop of Horrors
James Lasdun chronicles a murder trial in which his own dentist is the defendant.
Posted inEditor's Pick
After Marriage Equality, to Party or to Protest?
Two years after the passage of the Marriage Equality Act, Spenser Mestel looks back on his mixed emotions that day and his difficulty celebrating, particularly in light of four Supreme Court Justices dissenting.
Posted inEditor's Pick
My Dentist’s Murder Trial
James Lasdun tells the story of how his Kingston, NY-based dentist, Gilberto Nunez, D.D.S., wound up in prison. Lasdun writes about attending Nunez’s trial for the murder of his lover’s husband — a man he called his friend — with an eye toward the ways in which law enforcement can botch a case by determining […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
Exile in Guyville
Liz Phair and Elizabeth Wurtzel discuss the sexism they each are seeing everywhere.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Elizabeth Wurtzel Interview
Singer-songwriter Liz Phair interviews author Elizabeth Wurtzel on the occasion of the 20-year reissuing of Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, originally published in 1997. The two discuss writing memoir vs. writing fiction (Phair herself is at work on a novel and a book of linked essays), feminism, motherhood, and music.
Posted inEditor's Pick
My Father’s Adventure Was My Terror
Diana Whitney recalls traveling to Pakistan with her father at 13, and the dangers of a day trip to Peshawar that he was cautioned against taking.