Today I was so relieved to get a migraine. For the past thirty-plus years I’ve gotten migraines regularly; they were part of the whether that happened within and without. I would get a migraine after a manic jag. I would get a migraine before a blizzard. Now I rarely get them. I don’t want to […]
Quotes
Posted inQuotes
The Tell-Tale Hairs of Edgar Allan Poe
A reporter for the Baltimore American was there when the coffin was first re-opened, where it was inspected by a small gaggle of curious onlookers. According to him, the skeleton was “almost in perfect condition, and lying with the long bony hands reposing one upon the other,” while the skull had “some little hair…still clinging near […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Mysteries of the Universe, Still Out of Our Reach
Cosmology’s hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don’t know what came before it. They don’t know whether the Big Bang was the beginning, or merely one of many beginnings. Something entirely unimaginable might have preceded it. Cosmologists don’t know […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How Many Gigs Does It Take to Make It in NYC?
The gig economy (“a phrase which encompasses both the related collaborative economy and sharing economy”) is inescapable.
Posted inFiction, Quotes
John Keene’s ‘Rivers,’ A Speculative Huck Finn-Inspired Short Story
Huckleberry seized my hand, clasping it so tight he brought back in a quick flood of feelings those years with the Widow Watson, and whispered as if he wanted only me and not his friend to hear, “You take care of yourself, Jim, and keep out of all that trouble, please, cause this world is […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Novelist Samantha Hunt Contemplates Her Obsession with One Direction, and Mortality, Too
I love it here. I love girls, my three girls in particular. But I also love the hormonal girls who fill the ranks of 1D’s fans, Directioners. They are unembarrassed by their extreme passions. They are honestly mad for love or whatever chemistry the band is brewing in their bodies. The documentary film Crazy About One […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Proustian Powers of Ice Cream
Ice cream is Proustian. One bite can send you time-traveling decades back, to a hot summer day, when you walked barefoot on shell-dappled Gulf sands, vanilla ice cream dripping over the sides of a cone and onto your fingers. Maybe it was a reward for the first time you lost a tooth, a sweet, cold dish […]
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Jessica Hopper on Being a Writer Who’s ‘Rough Around the Edges’
Jessica Hopper is a the author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, editor of The Pitchfork Review and a legend in her own right.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
When Conservation Threatens Indigenous Peoples
But the Maasai of Loliondo are not alone in disputing these supposed benefits. Worldwide, 8 million square miles—a landmass almost as large as the entire African continent—have been classified as protected areas by governments and conservation groups. In turn, the locals have mostly been pushed off their lands. Though no one formally counts people displaced […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quote Posts, Quotes
Educating the Imagination: Kenneth Koch on Poetry
I was brought up in Cincinnati, Ohio. My parents were very nice. The first time I wrote a poem, my mother gave me a big kiss and said, “I love you.” The whole idea of writing poetry had a lot to do with escaping, escaping from the bourgeois society of Cincinnati, Ohio, escaping from any […]