Robert Smigel, writer: It wasn’t until my last season that the network refused to air a “TV Funhouse.” It was a live-action one that was meant to be about racism and profiling, an airline-safety video with multilingual narration, and whenever you heard a different language, they would cut to people of that nationality. First, typical […]
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What Do Chinese Dumplings Have to Do With Global Warming?
How the expansion of refrigeration in China is affecting climate change.
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‘Alice Munro Writes So Well About Secrets’
Then he had things to tell her about himself. The fact that he had produced a condom did not mean that he was a regular seducer. In fact, she was only the second person he had gone to bed with, the first being his wife. He had been brought up in a fiercely religious household […]
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Joan Rivers on Humor and Loss
GROSS: What are some of the most painful things that have happened to you that you’ve ended up making jokes about on stage? Ms. RIVERS: Oh, where do you start? My husband’s suicide. GROSS: Right. Ms. RIVERS: Some man, 60 years old, that couldn’t take the business and went and killed himself. How do you […]
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * *
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When Groucho Marx Quoted ‘The Waste Land’ to T.S. Eliot
Strange but true: Groucho Marx and T.S. Eliot were pen-pals. Their correspondence began in 1961, when T.S. Eliot sent Groucho Marx a fan letter. It continued for several years, with them finally meeting for dinner in 1964. From a recent post on Daybook: The much-postponed event took place just seven months before Eliot’s death at […]
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How To Win a Million Dollars Writing Poetry in Abu Dhabi
As poetry readings go, the setting was unique. The Al Raha Beach Theatre in Abu Dhabi boasted light-up floors, backdrop projections and a light show of a kind that would be familiar to fans of Pop Idol, X Factor or America’s Got Talent. Since February, global audiences of up to 70 million have tuned in […]
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Overcome Your Programming And Be A Better Man
Comedian Chris Gethard on being an angry high school outcast, and how he found a place in a world that “doesn’t owe you anything”: As someone who’s spent most of his life feeling like a round peg running into many square holes – it is so much more gratifying when you stop trying to force […]
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Object Lessons
Photographer Nina Berman, a professor at Columbia’s Journalism School, on the evolving state of photojournalism: There are stylistic trends in art and in literature, and everyone acknowledges them. But rarely are they cited in photojournalism, perhaps because people still cling to the idea of photography as an objective or neutral medium that captures a shared […]
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The Supreme Court Nominee, The Video Store, and the Changing Face of Consumer Privacy
Potomac Video, the last remaining video rental store in Washington D.C., will be shutting its doors after 33 years in business. Though there are surely plenty of good stories to be found in the some 60,000 DVDs now on sale at Potomac, perhaps the most interesting story is the role the Washington institution played in consumer privacy […]