One of the rarest religious experiences you can have in America is to join the Plain.
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Posted inNonfiction, Story, Unapologetic Women
Unchain My Heart: On the Emotional Effectiveness—and Lingering Sexism—of Jewish Divorce
Sari Botton explores the dark side of a tradition that has for millennia subverted women’s rights.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
Rebel Virgins and Desert Mothers
The radical women of early Christianity.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Broken Pop of James Bond Songs
What can the endurance of the messy, campy canon of James Bond theme songs tell us about contemporary popular music?
Posted inNonfiction
Borges and $: The Parable of the Literary Master and the Coin
Thirty years ago, the world lost a great literary mind—the Argentine writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges. Today, Elizabeth Hyde Stevens revisits the financial conditions that produced this life of pure literature, finding unexpected hope in the darkest period of Borges’ forgotten past.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Oregon’s Somewhat Secret, Racist Roots
Oregon’s natural beauty belies a nasty history. Slavery was never ratified, but the state made a point to exclude anyone who was Black or multiracial from living, working or owning property in its constitution. Matt Novak explains at Gizmodo…
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Using the British Railway Mania of the 1840s to Explain the Beanie Baby Craze
Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematician and bubble expert, proposes a simpler theory explaining speculative panics in his study on the British Railway Mania of the 1840s. Odlyzko credits Railway Mania in part to a “collective hallucination,” an extreme form of groupthink wherein a significant chunk of society feverishly buys into a shared dream with no regard for the skeptics and […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Franklin, Reconsidered: An Essay by Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore revisits the legacy of Benjamin Franklin, who in his time was “the most accomplished and famous American who had ever lived.”
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
The Walkable Multiverse According to Charles Jencks
On an abandoned mining site in Scotland, an architectural theorist attempts to bring the mysteries of the cosmos to life on Earth.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
‘I Would Prefer Not To’: The Origins of the White Collar Worker
Before the Civil War, the clerk was “a small but unusual phenomenon.” By the end of the 19th century, clerical workers were a social force to be reckoned with. This is the story of their rise.
