Nagging questions and doubts remain. Have we somehow prostituted ourselves for the vicarious entertainment of television viewers? Has the private language, the intimate currency of our happy household, been debased by making it public? I had thought it would be ‘fun.’ I was wrong. But somehow it has felt like an education of sorts — […]
Quotes
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘It Seemed a Sheet of Sun’: Reporting from Hiroshima, a Year After the Bomb
Seventy years ago, on August 6, 1945, the United States Air Force dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
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Joyce Maynard on Taking James Patterson’s Online Course in Writing Bestsellers
Lately, just about every time I turn to Facebook or Twitter, I’m greeted by an ad or sponsored content about the online writing course bestselling thriller author James Patterson offers on the MasterClass site (where Dustin Hoffman, Annie Liebovitz, Usher, Serena Williams and others serve up the tricks to their trades, too). “Set out to […]
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What is Sista Grrrl’s Riot? Punk Music, Collaboration and Revolution
Tamar-kali Brown, Maya Glick, Simi Stone, and Honeychild Coleman founded Sista Grrrl Riots, an alternative safe space for black women punks to rock out and revolutionize.
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On DJ Kool Herc and a Seminal Moment in Hip-Hop History
Journalist Jeff Chang’s 2005 book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop offers a history of hip-hop culture, and he’s particularly good at capturing the 1970s Bronx neighborhood party scene that helped start it all, with a young Jamaican-born DJ named Clive Campbell—who moved to the Bronx with his family as a child and soon started hosting parties as […]
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Bona-Fide Celebrities: Nikki Finke on the Late ’80s ‘Literary Brat Pack’
In 1987, a young Nikki Finke profiled the “Literary Brat Pack” (choice Brat Pack members included Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, of Less Than Zero and Bright Lights, Big City fame, respectively) for The Los Angeles Times.
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The Newman’s Own Origin Story
In 1982 actor Paul Newman and his friend, writer A.E. Hotchner, started the Newman’s Own food company and made the decision to donate all profits to charity.
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Lidia Yuknavitch on Mythologies We Adopt to Make Sense of Violence
Lidia Yuknavitch, author of the acclaimed new novel The Small Backs of Children, has a haunting essay up at Guernica about “Laume,” a mythological water spirit and guardian of all children that her Lithuanian grandmother introduced her to when she was young, and about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of violence and […]
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Disarming Nordic Fish Bombs
In 2014, The Telegraph reported that Inge Hausen, a pensioner from the Nordic village of Tyrsil, contacted an explosions expert from the Norwegian army about a 25-year-old can of fermented herring, called surströmming. The swollen can had lifted Hausen’s roof by two centimeters, and he feared it would explode. Here’s an excerpt from the article: […]
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The Cultural Impact of “A Wrinkle in Time”
L’Engle’s life–her family, her religion, her motherhood, her career, her writing decisions—have been subject to much speculation. Later in her celebrated, prolific career, she transitioned to writing about religion and family–more memoir, less fiction. But it’s her “children’s” books that remain the most popular.