Category: Nonfiction
I think there’s a very interesting poetry moment going on culturally now. Part of what I’m experiencing with this nice reception of this book is the way being a female poet is a certain version of coming of age — poetry is very diaristic, small pieces, an art form you can realize — you wrote […]
Before there was pop-punk, there was Billy Idol. More than any other artist of his era, the man born William Broad brought the style and attitude of punk rock into the American mainstream, via massive hits including “White Wedding” and “Rebel Yell.” For this, he was both celebrated and vilified. Fans adored Idol’s bad-boy image […]
Nothing is set in stone, except of course your epitaph. In a recent essay for Aeon, Tom Pitock mused on the difficulty of writing his own father’s epitaph, and why we etch words on tombstones to remember people we loved. But not every culture uses epitaphs, as Pitock learned in Greenland: It took real effort to find the cemetery […]
So here was my father, in this white apartment with textured walls and thick carpeting, and the scant amount of furniture and paintings he’d brought from Redmond, looking like interlopers, like imposters, neither here nor there. And we’re sitting in this living room and I have no idea who he is and he says, “So […]
If you don’t take Swift seriously, you don’t take contemporary music seriously. With the (arguable) exceptions of Kanye West and Beyoncé Knowles, she is the most significant pop artist of the modern age. The scale of her commercial supremacy defies parallel—she’s sold 1 million albums in a week three times, during an era when most […]
If [Rhiannon] Giddens were to tell us in a memoir that she’d been thinking about her own child when she sang, it would make the line a poignant narrative moment. But really, what would that reveal that we don’t know from her performance? It might risk drowning out other information we already have: Michael Brown’s […]
While we Americans were busy debating the latest in Joe Biden’s will-he-or-won’t-he status and trying to keep track of just how many Republicans are still in the race, Canada went ahead and elected* their next Prime Minister. So who is the soon-to-be resident of 24 Sussex? Justin Trudeau, the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, is a […]
What happened inside the Latitude Society? In September, we featured a Longreads Original by Rick Paulas, “‘We Value Experience,’” which told the story of artist/entrepreneur Jeff Hull and his group’s attempts to build a sustainable “secret society” in the Bay Area. Paulas has shared the following postscript on what happened after his story about the […]
Cricket flour is here, now what do we do with it? In Lucky Peach magazine, Michael Snyder writes about the many ways people in the Indian state of Nagaland cook their local insects. Your garden species will differ, but Snyder’s article, paired with Jennifer Billock’s “Are Insects the Future of Food?,” provides practical food for thought for a planet whose […]
Writing for The New Republic, Jacqui Shine recently looked at the long, strange history of the Disney-owned television network ABC Family, which will be renamed “Freeform” in January 2016. The network may feature progressive content like The Fosters, which has garnered GLAAD awards and acclaim for its portrayal of an interracial, same-sex couple, but its also had difficulty shaking its conservative […]
Although it felt better to raise cattle that weren’t drugged up, economically it was hard to rationalize the decision. Sales barns in the Midwest feed into the industrial agricultural system and make no distinction between grass-fed beef and doped up beef. A farmer just pulls his trailer up to the sales barn, drops the cattle […]
Earlier this week, for National Coming Out Day, comic actor Julie Novak performed her “one-person show,” “America’s Next Top: One Top’s Take on Life, Love, Tools and Boxes,” off-Broadway at the United Solo Festival. The show offers a funny, eye-opening take on something that has been a source of pain and discomfort, mostly in her early […]
Can a liberal arts college foster a culture of experimentation and personal growth while also ensuring the safety of its students? Connecticut’s Wesleyan University has long had a reputation for progressive students and politics (“Keep Wesleyan Weird” is a common refrain on campus), but after a headline-grabbing drug debacle this spring, the community finds itself grappling with the […]
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 […]
Only by elastic measures can “Walden” be regarded as nonfiction. Read charitably, it is a kind of semi-fictional extended meditation featuring a character named Henry David Thoreau. Read less charitably, it is akin to those recent best-selling memoirs whose authors turn out to have fabricated large portions of their stories. It is widely acknowledged that, […]
It’s strange, in the years of Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer changing comedy, and Tina Fey making room in TV, and Hillary Clinton making her cicada-like, quadrennial return, to pan the camera across the rigid men’s club of the arts. From the Chelsea galleries to the spring and fall auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s (which […]
Sam Kashner delves into the mysterious world of Michelin stars in the new issue of Vanity Fair, talking to top chefs about what it takes to gain—and keep—the restaurant world’s highest honor. Although restaurant critics are often recognized, Michelin inspectors remain virtually unknown. Kashner spoke on the phone with one inspector (even he wasn’t allowed to know […]
The President: How do you reconcile the idea of faith being really important to you and you caring a lot about taking faith seriously with the fact that, at least in our democracy and our civic discourse, it seems as if folks who take religion the most seriously sometimes are also those who are suspicious […]
In the Seattle Weekly, Steve Griggs writes about John Coltrane’s first and only performances in Seattle, at the 225-seat Penthouse club, in 1965. Griggs provides a snapshot of the saxophonist’s life following his groundbreaking album A Love Supreme, during a period of artistic transition. Coltrane was usually in transition. He was expanding his sound again in […]
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