Unlike most sports, pro wrestling is unconcerned with numbers. Nobody seems to have a win-loss record. In lucha libre, the truly important matches, the bouts that make up one’s official record, are not even world championships. They are, rather, Mask vs. Mask matches, or Hair vs. Hair, or Hair vs. Mask. Luchadores wager their masks or their […]
Category: Nonfiction
We believe automatically that Chris Knight is not — could never actually be — that homeless man with a gun. Put the same lyric in Killer Mike’s mouth, though, and you think something different, don’t you? You do not assume instantly that Mike is merely inhabiting a character. No, in your mind, he is the […]
Unlike fellow giants like Williams, Merle Haggard or Dolly Parton, who have plenty of obvious imitators, no one sounds like Nelson. He’s an uncanny vocal phraser: “The three masters of rubato in our age are Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles and Willie Nelson,” said the late producer Jerry Wexler. “The art of gliding over the meter […]
I have a dear friend who’s working at the library in Chattanooga, which is one of the rare states where the budget is increasing, and she’s doing all of this neat stuff with technology: bringing in 3-D printers, teaching web-use skills, all of these public services that are really necessary beyond making books available for […]
I know that for the rest of my life, I’ll have to explain myself to future employers. My hope is that my work and life experience become of such high quality that my education (or lack thereof) will fall off the bottom of my résumé. I’m aware it will be an uphill battle. Traveling was […]
Chaz Ebert stopped practicing law when she married Roger, and ran the business side of things for him. They worked side-by-side throughout their marriage. As he became sicker, and was only able to communicate through a computer, Chaz’s role grew. At some point, he asked me to be his voice. So we would do some […]
His best friend’s mom laughed when Lanza told her he wanted to become a doctor. “You’d probably make a very good carpenter,” she said. When Lanza announced his plan for the school science fair—he would alter a chicken’s genetics and turn it from white to black—his classmates giggled and his teacher said it was impossible. […]
In my twenties I realized that the muse is a bum. The muse only shows up when you bait her by putting your ass in the chair. She can only be lured to your side by the sound of pounding keys, the smell of paper and ink. At some point (I imagine it was when […]
Of the 43 deaths in unregulated homes, The Post’s review found that 22 were sleep-related, 10 involved physical abuse, three were accidental and one was natural. In seven cases, the causes were unclear in the available records. All but one of the sleep-related deaths involved risky actions taken by caretakers, records show. These included leaving […]
I always give people this advice when people ask me how to do things—and it’s not like I’m in a position to advise people on how to do anything. But I feel like we try to make these big decisions, and really we only have to make small decisions, in all moments. I don’t understand […]
About seven years ago I wrote a story about a cat in a bad mood. And then the next fall another one. So I tried to write a few every year, but for every one that worked, there were two that didn’t. And then, obviously, I stepped it up over the past year and a […]
It’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing. Oh, we’ll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the preflight […]
Surrounded by thousands of people at the Washington Convention Center buying books from the Politics & Prose pavilion, taking pictures with Clifford, moving downstairs to sneak into a panel by Dav Pilkey or Louisa Lim or Cokie Roberts, and waiting in line to meet their literary heroes, I felt like I could levitate. I thought: These are […]
LE GUIN: My mother had always wanted to write. She told me this only after she’d started writing. She waited until she got the kids out of the house, until she was free of responsibility for anybody except her husband. Very typical of her generation. She was in her fifties when she started writing—for kids, […]
We are very excited to announce that Jessica Wilbanks’ essay “On The Far Side of the Fire” has been named as a finalist for the Pen Center USA 2014 Literary Awards. Wilbanks’ essay was honored in Pen Center USA’s journalism category. The piece was first published in the Fall/Winter 2013 issue of Ninth Letter and later made its […]
Compared with my classmates on the second tier, my test scores were on the lower end. Each week, in my literature class, we were responsible for the recitation of some French poems (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Lamartine) from memory, and each day we had to recite a stanza. This sort of exercise may well be familiar to […]
Whales make calls for a number of reasons—to navigate, to find food, to communicate with each other—and for certain whales, like humpbacks and blues, songs also seem to play a role in sexual selection. Blue males sing louder than females, and the volume of their singing—at more than 180 decibels—makes them the loudest animals in […]
Part of the reason Hartman remains fuzzy in our memories was his own doing. When he joined SNL’s cast in 1986, it was customary for a newcomer to declare he would be the next John Belushi. Hartman had a different ambition. He told the Los Angeles Times he wanted to be the next Dan Aykroyd. […]
Jeff and Tiernae Buttars made a difficult decision to have a portion of their son’s brain surgically removed to eliminate his seizures. William Buttars was 11 months old when he endured the nine-hour surgery. In Indianapolis Monthly, Michael Rubino reports about how this decision changed the lives of everyone involved and how William, now a […]
Uber’s aggressive tactics reflect the fact that ridesharing is largely a zero-sum game: a driver picking up an Uber customer can’t simultaneously pick up a Lyft customer. (Drivers are allowed to drive for both services, though the companies discourage the practice.) Having more active drivers on the road creates a virtuous circle that improves geographical […]
The pumpkin spice latte has reemerged. Seattle Met’s Allecia Vermillion looks at the origin story of the popular fall beverage, which actually contains little discernible pumpkin. Since the pumpkin spice latte’s inception 11 years ago, customers have ordered more than 200 million, each topped with whipped cream and a parting shake of spices. It arrives […]
As much as [Hervé] This has spent his career chiselling deductions down to the molecular bone of physical chemistry, he is still entranced by the art involved in making something delicious. He talked volumes, veering between the intricacies of the chemistry of emulsions and the delights of a meal prepared with care and served with […]
Conventional wisdom tells us that people are terrible with numbers. But as Kent realized back in the 1950s, we are even worse with words. In one study that Fischhoff co-authored, people had trouble understanding a 30-percent chance of rain. It wasn’t the probability that tripped them up, but the word: rain. Are we talking drizzle […]
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