In its growth, Governors Ball is benefitting from and contributing to the festival explosion of the past decade, a trend that a new Eventbrite study (on the “Top 2014 Music Festival Trends and Insights”) claims has resulted in one in every five millennials attending at least one festival per year. Though big, multi-day productions have thrived longer […]
Quotes
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Science Magazine’s 2013 Spoof Paper Sting Operation
On 4 July, good news arrived in the inbox of Ocorrafoo Cobange, a biologist at the Wassee Institute of Medicine in Asmara. It was the official letter of acceptance for a paper he had submitted 2 months earlier to the Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals, describing the anticancer properties of a chemical that Cobange had extracted from […]
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How Comics Helped Me Face My Diagnosis
For years, unhelpful doctors and misdiagnoses plagued Al Rosenberg’s life. At Women Write About Comics, she discusses the validation she found in graphic novels and comics.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
How Judy Blume Will Save You: An Aunt’s Letter to Her 5-Year-Old Niece
Dear Raisin, I don’t have much advice for you. I likely never will. When you get older, you’ll know better than to ask me: Your mom is smarter, kinder, and taller than I am. In most cases, she’ll know better than anyone else. One thing I can tell you is that, regardless of how close […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Vanity Fair Protected Their Caitlyn Jenner Exclusive
The magazine was concerned about leaks and took security measures “every step of the way,” including on the photo shoot [where they hired security and confiscated cellphones], in the VF editorial office and at the printing plant for the upcoming issue. The story and pictures were done on a single computer that was never connected […]
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Thought Catalog and First-Person Essay Industrial Complex
And it has predicted a remarkable rise in juicy, first-person writing on the Internet. Consider the success of xoJane, which launched in 2011, or of The Washington Post’s “PostEverything” blog. On Medium.com and Jezebel, memoirish personal essays win big. CNN ramped up its “First Person” project in 2013. And Vox.com just recently followed suit. As of press time, the Ezra […]
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Looter to Who? James Baldwin on Racism in America
In 1968, essayist, novelist and activist James Baldwin spoke with Esquire about racism in America, Dr. Martin Luther King, poverty and police brutality. In our current era of high profile police violence in communities like Ferguson, Missouri, and protests in Baltimore, Maryland, Baldwin’s words sound as prescient and, unfortunately, fresh as they did forty-seven years […]
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Vanity Fair’s New Cover Story: Caitlyn Jenner
“As soon as the Vanity Fair cover comes out, I’m free.” Vanity Fair has just released its cover image of Caitlyn Jenner—photographed by Annie Leibovitz, with a story by Buzz Bissinger. The story is not yet available online, but Jenner tells Bissinger: “If I was lying on my deathbed and I had kept this secret […]
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Quotes
When Blondes Go Wrong
After I found out about the Blonde Fury, I thought I’d better colour my hair again. I bought the dye at the same drugstore where I’d bought the pregnancy test, only this time its shelves were half vacant. There was an inventory girl with dark blueberry hair who stood in front of the selection with […]
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A Hospital Chaplain Reflects on Poetry and Dying
A few weeks later, my friend sends me a copy of Dunn’s poem “A Coldness.” The speaker says about his sick brother, “From then on he was delusional, / the cancer making him / stupid, insistently so, and lost. / I wanted him to die. / And I wished his wife / would say A […]