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 […]
Category: Nonfiction
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 […]
This past weekend, just a few days before the release of Big Magic: Creativity Beyond Fear, Elizabeth Gilbert’s new ode to the creative spirit, I bumped into her in the restroom at Omega Institute, where she was speaking. As I was drying my hands, she caught a glimpse of the Anaïs Nin quote tattooed on […]
I began the fifth grade with long hair, but at some point in the middle of the year I chopped it into what was then called a pixie cut. When I returned to school newly shorn, I was informed that the boy I liked, a boy who had supposedly liked me back, had withdrawn his […]
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 […]
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 […]
I have long taken an interest in how I might eat myself to old age. I visited the southern Japanese Okinawa islands whose population is said to include the largest proportion of centenarians in the country and met with some of them in what is supposedly the village with the oldest demographic in the world, […]
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 […]
As dusk settles on the Magdalena Valley, the jungly middle stretch of Colombia’s great river basin, the hippopotamuses bawl and snort. The indelicate groans of these multi-ton beasts border on comedic, but mostly their ruckus is a fearsome thing—a primal ritual that has churned these waters ever since Pablo Escobar imported four hippos to his […]
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, […]
Sometimes it seems like everyone’s selling something. They’re selling their jewelry. They’re selling their book, selling their snack line, their natural cosmetics, their Etsy shop and blog and, ultimately, themselves. In The New Yorker‘s 2015 Style Issue, Lizzie Widdicombe writes about Bethenny Frankel, who turned her slot on The Real Housewives of New York City into […]
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 […]
All of that mid-century Marxist devotional intensity was concentrated in Mimi and Chimen’s bedroom. There were Socialist and Communist books in Russian, German, Yiddish, French, English, Hebrew. There were old pamphlets so yellowed by time that one risked their disintegration simply by touching them. When Chimen and his close friend Henry Collins, who had collaborated […]
A much better example came on Central Park West in the lower Sixties, where a second Mohammad operated a stand. He told me that he’s from Alexandria and has been in New York for four years. (“Some people are good. Others, not so much,” he said of his customers.) Every winter, when the hot-dog business […]
At Catapult, Alexander Chee has a self-reflective essay about a period in the early aughts when he got to sublet a friend’s plum 19th-story apartment in Gramercy Park. She let him have it for just $900 per month, a steal, which took a great deal of financial pressure off of him. This was after the […]
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 […]
Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what […]
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 […]
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