In Atlanta Magazine, Christine Van Dusen tells the story of the Fletcher family, who sat behind the dugouts at a baseball game at Turner Field and experienced the horror of having one of their children struck by a foul ball, fracturing her skull. Cabrera’s swing, so quick and effortless as to seem almost an afterthought, […]
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This country is too fucking big. I honestly think… In nature, if a cell gets too big, it divides. You can’t come up with a set of rules that’s going to work for 350 million people. You’re just not. So we’re stuck. Robert Kennedy had this great quote: “20 percent of people are against everything, […]
After more than two thousand interviews, the investigators concluded that forty-four schools had cheated and that a “culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation has infested the district, allowing cheating—at all levels—to go unchecked for years.” They wrote that data had been “used as an abusive and cruel weapon to embarrass and punish.” Several teachers had […]
In the Village Voice, Chris Kornelis writes about how Bob Marley became a household name posthumously thanks to some careful remarketing: Robinson had a hunch that suburban record buyers were uneasy with Marley’s image — that of a perpetually stoned, politically driven iconoclast associated with violence. And so he commissioned a London-based researcher named Gary […]
What is [death]? It’s a fact that human beings—no matter who they are, no matter how healthy or strong or beautiful they are—are going to age and become weak and ugly by a certain standard, and die. And I think that’s a terrifying idea for people to get their minds around. It’s a very strange […]
By the time I had a few thousand followers on Twitter, people began to refer to me as a “public figure.” While mine was a paltry fame compared to literally thousands of cishet white men in the industry, that type of visibility for women is far rarer due to sexism, misogyny, online harassment, the way […]
Three months later, on October 27, 1943, Roosevelt turned his idea into a concrete proposal, formally asking Congress to enact legislation that would finance one year of educational or vocational training for all who served in World War II. Those deemed to have academic potential would be eligible for support for four years. “For many, […]
At Aeon, Carlin Flora looks at the pros and cons of praising children and what psychologists say to avoid: Over-praising children (You’re amazing!) can make them feel your standards are very high, causing the fear that they won’t be able to keep living up to them, say the psychologists Jennifer Henderlong Corpus of Reed College […]
Zoos contact Virga when animals develop difficulties that vets and keepers cannot address, and he is expected to produce tangible, observable results. Often, the animals suffer from afflictions that haven’t been documented in the wild and appear uncomfortably close to our own: He has treated severely depressed snow leopards, brown bears with obsessive-compulsive disorder and […]
"You should presume that someday, we will be able to make machines that can reason, think and do things better than we can,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a conversation with Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla. To someone as smart as Brin, that comment is as normal as sipping on his super-green juice, but […]
At Pacific Standard, Ted Scheinman talks to his favorite writers about how they deal with writer’s block. Some step away from their work and return to it later, while others look to their favorite writers for inspiration. One of the most interesting responses came from The Awl’s Choire Sicha, who says he hasn’t had to […]
In the upcoming Sunday Book Review, Anna Holmes discusses some of the rookie mistakes she made as a new writer: I regret many things, including, but not limited to: Inserting myself into reported narratives where I didn’t belong. Crafting long, complex sentences that I thought made me sound intelligent and sophisticated. Assuming that aggressive, masculine-sounding […]
Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams, a book of essays, writes in the Guardian about the power of confessional writing: Confession doesn’t just allow – it incites. Someone tweeted about my essays: “After reading this book, I want to write about my hidden pain until my fingers bleed, and then I want to write […]
My great great grandmother was also a Katharine Marie. I don’t know a lot about her, but I wish I did. I learned that when my parents were choosing names for their baby, they had settled on Katharine were I to be designated female at birth. I only found out when I brought up the […]
I don’t think I was the only one who had trouble holding it together. We had come all this way and cashed in so much good fortune for the outside chance that we might see those eight Emperor penguins pick their way across the ice. And we did. In a world that can seem purpose-built […]
At the New York Times, reporters Steven Greenhouse and Stephanie Strom look at businesses that pay their employees well over minimum wage, including In-N-Out burger, which starts employees off at $10.50 an hour, and Boloco, a burrito chain with 22 restaurants in New England: John Pepper, Boloco’s co-founder, said the strategy for his Boston-based company […]
Support, salvation, transformation, life: this is what women give to one another when they are true friends, soul friends, what the Irish call anam cara. It’s what the Wrinklies did for one another, what the French resistance fighters in Auschwitz did for one another, what women do for one another in real relationships with real […]
Laurie Woolever, in The Billfold, on how she ended up becoming Anthony Bourdain’s assistant: With my dad’s help, I took out a loan and did a 6-month professional course at the French Culinary Institute, while continuing to work part-time for the family for a few months. I soon learned that I was poorly equipped to […]
Though Eno drew and painted at both Ipswich and Winchester, he left school with no plans to become a fine artist. “I thought that art schools should just be places where you thought about creative behavior, whereas they thought an art school was a place where you made painters,” he said later. “I think negative […]
The new issue of Wired has a story about Jim Olson, a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher whose lab is looking into whether a scorpion-venom concoction can help detect cancer cells in our bodies. Injecting our bodies with scorpion venom may sound somewhat outlandish, but it’s been used in medicine for quite a long time: […]
I had a beautiful childhood and a lovely childhood. I just didn’t like being a child. I didn’t like the rank injustice of not being listened to. I didn’t like the lack of autonomy. I didn’t like my chubby little hands that couldn’t manipulate the world of objects in the way that I wanted them […]
“In goal, you’re taking in all the movement, all the runs,” Howard said. “You see everything. You’re yelling. You’re tense. You’re so wired-in. To tell you the truth, I don’t enjoy the game—I’ve never actually had fun within the course of those ninety minutes.” Because the object is always a shutout—a “clean sheet,” as the […]
At the Dissolve, Tasha Robinson discusses why having a Strong Female Character in a film isn’t good enough if her presence is superficial. Robinson cites Valka from How To Train Your Dragon 2 as an example, as well as Strong Female Characters from other recent films: And Valka’s type—the Strong Female Character With Nothing To […]
What ultimately brought their work together to a halt was not creative disagreements but business ones. During his power grab, John was sweet-talked by a canny, dubious manager named Allen Klein, with whom he promptly signed. George and Ringo followed—pure primate politics there. But Paul would not. And so legend has it that the Beatles […]
At Vogue, Mira Jacob writes about watching her parents love 30 years after being paired up in an arranged marriage: The night before I went back to New York, I came home to a sight so disquieting that I stood outside in the dark for a full five minutes, just watching. It was late. The […]
BLVR: I’ve heard you guys had a no-analyzing rule for a while. You wouldn’t talk to each other about how the show went. TA: That was for about a year. You come offstage and no one can say anything. At all. At all. Because everyone’s got their own perspective. BLVR: Someone might think it’s a […]
I’m interested in the way that Americans — well, probably people in general — tend to address their anxiety with yap. I know I do. This tendency to lack the self-confidence to simply not do anything — to refrain, to be silent, not react, not shoot, just stay out of the shit — that seems […]