She was less like a recluse, more like a bomb going off.
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Gidget,’ John Hughes, and the Whitewashing of Jewishness in Pop Culture
This whitewashing of Jewishness out of pop culture is an old, old story, and it isn’t specific to camp movies; it’s true of plenty of other Hollywood representations of American teens, too. The Czech Jew who wrote the novel that was the basis for Gidget (1959) was inspired by his own surfing daughter, Kathy Kohner, who went on […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Generational Shift for Kenya's Maasai Tribe
Once the lords of East Africa, the Maasai have been close to peerless in the modern age for maintaining the continuity of their traditions—traditions now imperiled by the tentacles of the market and by technology, as cell phones and cheap Chinese motorcycles, like the one we rode, upend the very possibility of isolation. Compulsory and […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Dilemma the Food Movement is Facing: Can We Really Be 'Conscientious Carnivores?'
The dream of the “Food Movement” is for all meat to be humanely raised and locally sourced so we can all be “conscientious carnivores.” In The American Scholar, James McWilliams looks at a dilemma the Food Movement is facing: Can animals be raised humanely if the end goal is not for animals to live a […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
A Loaded Gun: The Real Emily Dickinson
She was less like a recluse, more like a bomb going off.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Get to Know the National Book Award Finalists for Nonfiction
This reading list features the five nonfiction nominees for the National Book Awards. The winner be announced on November 18, 2015.
Posted inNonfiction
By the Reflection of What Is
On the aesthetics, performance, and “majestic wrath” of Frederick Douglass, the most-photographed American of the nineteenth century.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Get to Know the National Book Award Finalists for Nonfiction
This reading list features the five nonfiction nominees for the National Book Awards. The winner be announced on November 18, 2015.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Olive Oil Trouble
Olive-oil fraud was already common in antiquity. Galen tells of unscrupulous oil merchants who mixed high-quality olive oil with cheaper substances like lard, and Apicius provides a recipe for turning cheap Spanish oil into prized oil from Istria using minced herbs and roots. The Greeks and the Romans used olive oil as food, soap, lotion, […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
The Politics of Poetry
The New York Times’s poetry columnist on the intersection between poetry and politics.
