You know those junk mail checks you get in the mail for thousands of dollars that aren’t negotiable for cash? Patrick Combs deposited one for $95,093.35 at his bank’s ATM as a joke. The funny thing is: It cleared his account. He wrote about his experience for the Financial Times a few summers ago: All […]
Category: Nonfiction
Science fiction writer Eileen Gunn recently wrote in Smithsonian magazine about how the science fiction genre informs the way we think about the real world. Here, Gunn writes that big tech companies like Microsoft have hired science fiction writers to do “design fiction”—coming up with new technology ideas through imaginative works: Microsoft, Google, Apple and […]
Continuing to brave the Indian Ocean, and continuing to die, only illustrates their desperation in a new, disturbing kind of light. This is the subtext to the plight of every refugee: Whatever hardship he endures, he endures because it beats the hardship he escaped. Every story of exile implies the sadder story of a homeland. […]
A decade ago, Britney Spears worked on an album called “Original Doll” that she hoped would prove herself as a songwriter. Her record label denied the album existed even though Spears did a radio interview where she previewed one of the songs. At Buzzfeed, Hunter Schwarz writes about Spears’s lost album: On “Take Off,” Spears […]
Jill Abramson left the New York Times’s executive editor position today and was replaced by Dean Baquet, the managing editor at the newspaper. At The New Yorker, Ken Auletta writes about what happened behind the scenes: As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her […]
Learning to capture the details that matter can take years. Beginning writers rely on physical traits to explain subjects, or do a notebook dump of descriptions that tell the audience nothing much at all. Connor Radnovich’s profile of Mike White, a Gulf War veteran with ALS, demonstrates a studied use of detail. Radnovich tells us […]
In Aeon, Jalees Rehman, an associate professor of medicine and pharmacology at the University of Illinois, discusses the potential healing power of stem cells found in human fat tissue: The discovery of regenerative cells within our fat has opened up new doors. As adult stem cells, they can be converted into tissues such as bone […]
JOHN WELLS, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: I had a deal at NBC because they wanted me to continue to be involved in ER. So we developed West Wing there, but they didn’t want to do it right away. “The American audience isn’t interested in politics” and “there’s plenty of that on Sunday morning television” were some of […]
University Heights High School is located in one of the poorest congressional district in America, and six miles away, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School charges $43,000-a-year for tuition and is attended by the children of celebrities.
During the next two years, more than twenty million dollars of Zuckerberg’s gift and matching donations went to consulting firms with various specialties: public relations, human resources, communications, data analysis, teacher evaluation. Many of the consultants had worked for Joel Klein, Teach for America, and other programs in the tight-knit reform movement, and a number […]
Back from dropping off the kids, and ready to write! Except I definitely have to exercise first. It’s going to be 90 degrees out there today and the dogs need to run and I don’t want to kill them—or worse, maim them and then decline chest-cracking at the billion-dollar emergency dog cancer spa. I know […]
The quinces were weird. We didn’t know what to make of them, figuratively or literally. Did people eat them? They could have come from space. In fact on Sesame Street there used to be a skit that involved two aliens. They couldn’t reach the fruit on their planet’s fruit trees. One alien was too short, […]
Last year, Jacob Bernstein wrote about his mother Nora Ephron’s last days for The New York Times Magazine. In the following excerpt, Bernstein writes about the moment he learned that his mother’s aggressive blood disorder had turned into leukemia and saw his mother in a rare state of vulnerability: When I arrived in her room, […]
He was cute; he was vulnerable; he had glasses. Really cool glasses. His hair was unfortunate; his features were delicate; in his videos, he could never quite hold eye contact with the camera. He wore sweaters a lot, and he sang about wearing the sweaters; he was a sweater-wearing dude, that Rivers Cuomo. He sang […]
It takes us a long time, as children, to get outside of ourselves and realize our parents have lives outside the scope of us. Not just lives before us, or lives after we move out, but wholly private lives that run concurrent with our own upbringing. As her daughter, it took me nearly 20 years […]
Just the other day, I received an e-mail from a photographer looking for an internship. His short note almost brought me to tears: “I come from Sarajevo, Bosnia, and my life has put me though many challenges. I am saying this because I have had the chance to see the worst in humans and was […]
Pink is a funny thing. In the early days of the 20th century, pink was not necessarily a girl color. I’ve even heard that pink was considered a popular color for boys because it was a lighter version of red, which has always been seen as powerful and masculine. But as the 20th century went […]
Chicago is no stranger to the hazards of being an industrial town, and residents of the Southeast Side have lived with the more pervasive realities of industry for over a century. Petcoke is the latest iteration of this struggle: another chapter of confusion, ignorance, and inconsistent government action. The wind that blows along Lake Michigan’s […]
The driving question for the series is, Who are we? When we talk about “we,” who is that? In the pilot, Pete Campbell has this line, “Adding money and education doesn’t take the rude edge out of people.” Sophisticated anti-Semitism. I overheard that line when I was a schoolteacher. The person, of course, didn’t know […]
The lines between my life and these lists blur often, and this week is no exception; I begin a new job tomorrow. 1. “Workin’ 9 to 5 (What a Way to Make a Living).” (Megan Reynolds, The Billfold, April 2014) “I can’t shake the feeling that the 9-to-5 grind carries the one hallmark of adulthood—obligation. […]
The American Society of Magazine Editors handed out its 2014 National Magazine Awards Thursday night, with Fast Company, New York magazine, Inc., Poetry magazine and Modern Farmer all taking home trophies. Boston Magazine’s stirring cover image (above) following the Boston Marathon bombings was named ASME’s Cover of the Year. Below is a reading list featuring some of […]
“When people ask what kind of nonfiction I write, I say ‘all kinds,’ but really I mean I don’t write any kind at all: I’m trying to dissolve the borders between memoir and journalism and criticism by weaving them together.” – Leslie Jamison This week, Choose Your Own Adventure with Leslie Jamison. I’ve compiled a […]
Even in Google’s earliest days, Page had always wanted the company to do more than just basic Web search. Since he was a kid, he’d been dreaming up world-changing schemes. As an undergrad at the University of Michigan, he’d proposed that the school replace its bus system with something he called a PRT, or personal […]
I’m reasonably certain that John Ashcroft didn’t recognize himself disguised as the evil high school guidance counselor in one of my novels. But like so much else, this thorny matter requires consideration on a case-by-case basis. In Mary McCarthy’s story “The Cicerone,” Peggy Guggenheim, the important collector of modern art, appears as Polly Grabbe, an […]
Above photo: Not Moppy and Molly *** What exactly did 4/20 look like on a college campus a decade ago? In 2004’s “The Fully Baked Adventures of Moppy and Molly,” published in Rolling Stone (pdf), Vanessa Grigoriadis profiled a young couple celebrating at UC Santa Cruz: The first 4:20 for Molly and Moppy came at 4:20 A.M.—they […]
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