Ringo first met [Harry] Nilsson after the singer did a gonzo version of Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep-Mountain High.” “It was bordering on madness, and so we thought, ‘We gotta meet this guy,’ ” says Ringo. While Nilsson’s destructive friendship with Lennon got the ink — they drunkenly heckled the Smothers Brothers at L.A.’s Troubadour, and […]
Quotes
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Loneliness and Isolation: Necessary Ingredients of Creativity?
(Vincent) Van Gogh likely had a cadre of mental issues, none of which were suitably diagnosed while he was alive. Yet what seemed to weigh heaviest on him was the inevitability of his loneliness. According to his letters to Theo, he felt he had one of two options: content himself with loneliness or try to […]
Posted inPodcasts, Quotes
Who Wrote ‘Happy Birthday’?
Most musicologists who’ve traced the origins of “Happy Birthday” agree that its musical score dates back to the work of two Kentucky sisters in the late 19th century: Mildred Jane Hill (b.1859), and Patty Smith Hill (b.1868). After graduating as valedictorian of Louisville Collegiate Institute, Patty went on to be a central figure in the progressive […]
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How Does a Magazine Go About Calculating the Financial Cost of Gun Violence?
To begin to get a grasp on the economic toll, Mother Jones turned to Ted Miller at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, an independent nonprofit that studies public health, education, and safety issues. Miller has been one of the few researchers to delve deeply into guns, going back to the late 1980s when he began analyzing societal […]
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Why Las Vegas Doesn’t Have a Major League Sports Team
Leagues have historically avoided Las Vegas for two main reasons. Until recently, it wasn’t a particularly large metro area by population. Now, however, it ranks 30th — and is bigger than 12 areas (including Salt Lake City, Raleigh, and Buffalo) that do have pro teams. The other factor, though, has been the simple fact that Nevada law […]
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(Wo)Man vs. Mozzarella: What Happens When You Commit to ‘Endless Appetizers’
My first plate arrives. The mozzarella sticks are golden, dense, and huge. Each one is greater than the width of two of my index fingers.
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Gillian Welch on How April 14th Came to Be ‘Ruination Day’
April 15 may be Tax Day, but for some—especially singer Gillian Welch—it’s the 14th of April that’s notorious. April 14 marks the anniversary of three awful, fabled events: the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865; the Titanic striking an iceberg in 1912 (it sunk in the wee hours of the 15th); and the Black Sunday dust storm of […]
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The Woes of the Corporate Anthropologist
In classical anthropology, there’s a rigid distinction between “field” and “home.” Field’s where you go to do your research, immersing yourself, sometimes at great personal risk, in a maelstrom of raw, unsorted happening. Home’s where you go to sort and tame it: catalogue it, analyze it, transform it in to something meaningful. But when the […]
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When the British Museum Reading Room Was Bohemian London’s Most Happening Spot
It’s counterintuitive to think of the British Museum as a happening spot, but for a long time its reading room served as a premier gathering place for London’s brainy bohemians. In the 1880s, these included radicals like George Bernard Shaw, Henry Havelock Ellis, and Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s youngest daughter. They worked there, and they talked […]
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Is W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ the Most Pillaged Piece of Literature in the English Language?
[W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem] “The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, […]