Of the 43 deaths in unregulated homes, The Post’s review found that 22 were sleep-related, 10 involved physical abuse, three were accidental and one was natural. In seven cases, the causes were unclear in the available records. All but one of the sleep-related deaths involved risky actions taken by caretakers, records show. These included leaving […]
Quotes
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Tamar Adler, in Praise of Small Decisions
I always give people this advice when people ask me how to do things—and it’s not like I’m in a position to advise people on how to do anything. But I feel like we try to make these big decisions, and really we only have to make small decisions, in all moments. I don’t understand […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
David Sedaris on the Dangerous Business of Naming a Cat
About seven years ago I wrote a story about a cat in a bad mood. And then the next fall another one. So I tried to write a few every year, but for every one that worked, there were two that didn’t. And then, obviously, I stepped it up over the past year and a […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
David Foster Wallace on the Costs of Becoming a Professional Tennis Player
It’s better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing. Oh, we’ll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the preflight […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Ursula K. Le Guin On ‘Starting Late’ as a Writer
LE GUIN: My mother had always wanted to write. She told me this only after she’d started writing. She waited until she got the kids out of the house, until she was free of responsibility for anybody except her husband. Very typical of her generation. She was in her fifties when she started writing—for kids, […]
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‘I Did Not Have a Culture of Scholastic High Achievement Around Me’
Compared with my classmates on the second tier, my test scores were on the lower end. Each week, in my literature class, we were responsible for the recitation of some French poems (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Lamartine) from memory, and each day we had to recite a stanza. This sort of exercise may well be familiar to […]
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The Life of a Full-Time Barbecue Editor
Daniel Vaughn, on what it’s like to work as Texas Monthly’s full-time barbecue editor.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, The Atavist Magazine
The Loneliest Whale in the World
Whales make calls for a number of reasons—to navigate, to find food, to communicate with each other—and for certain whales, like humpbacks and blues, songs also seem to play a role in sexual selection. Blue males sing louder than females, and the volume of their singing—at more than 180 decibels—makes them the loudest animals in […]
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The Mysteries of Phil Hartman’s Creative Genius
Part of the reason Hartman remains fuzzy in our memories was his own doing. When he joined SNL’s cast in 1986, it was customary for a newcomer to declare he would be the next John Belushi. Hartman had a different ambition. He told the Los Angeles Times he wanted to be the next Dan Aykroyd. […]
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The Evolution of Our Diet and What Modern Menus are Doing to Us
Ann Gibbons in National Geographic on how our diets have evolved and whether returning to a “Stone Age diet” would help prevent high blood pressure, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.