Someone is Wrong on the Internet: A Study in Pandemic Distraction
What do you do when all productivity hacks, parenting tips, and writing tricks lead to the same outcome — a total, pandemic-induced inability to focus?
How J.K. Rowling Betrayed the World She Created
“On transphobia and growing up in the Harry Potter universe.”
The Last Train Trip Before Everything Changed
On solitude, snow, and finding reasons to write.
At the Very Beginning of the Great Alaska Earthquake
“Many people mistook the low growl of the churning earth for a nuclear bomb.” An excerpt from THIS IS CHANCE!
The Storykiller and His Sentence: Rebecca Solnit on Harvey Weinstein
Rebecca Solnit considers Harvey Weinstein’s 23-year prison sentence through the lens of storytelling, and who gets to do it now that at least two men who were “in charge of stories” — Weinstein and Woody Allen — have in the past week lost so much of their power, and women are now finding their voices.
How Judith Jones Radically Transformed American Food Writing
Julia Child, MFK Fisher, Edna Lewis — behind the most influential food writers was one innovative, exacting editor.
How Do We Preserve the Vanishing Foods of the Earth?
On biodiversity, wild plants, and the legacy of Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov.
On Finding the Freedom to Rage Against Our Fathers
“Growing up, my mother taught us three girls how to read our father’s moods like the weather, how to discern their ever-shifting winds. How to carve out a childhood at the base of an active volcano. How to survive the flash flood that was my father’s temper, rage like water rising fast. He’d yell, he’d berate, he’d snarl. He’d snatch sentences from our mouths before we could finish them and twist them against us. This was at home. This was at school. This was without notice.”
Alix Ohlin: How to Write—and Not—About the Struggle to Have a Child
“The question What kind of writer are you? veered ever closer to the question What kind of woman are you? The world seemed to want to reduce the possibilities of my life to either/or categories—good writer/bad writer; mother/not mother—and I felt suspended somewhere in between.”
The Stories We Tell Our Sons About Becoming Men
A mother struggles to raise a son who embodies the values she has fought for as a feminist.
