When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to […]
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Posted inFiction, Quotes
The Tigers in Beijing Wear Suits
“He read a legend of a girl whose father took pains as she should never go out into the world. But one day she wandered through a gap in the wall before her father found her. ‘What is that creature with fluffy hair that goes baa?’ ‘It is a sheep, my daughter.’ ‘And what is […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘West Wing’ Uncensored
An oral history of the beloved political series: Aaron Sorkin: Kivi knew about the meeting and said, “Hey, you know what would make a good series? That.” He was pointing at the poster for The American President. “But this time you’d focus on the staffers.” I told him I wasn’t going to be doing a […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
Theorizing the Drone
What does the rise of the drone mean for justice, for the ethics of heroism, for psychology? Most important of all, who is dying and why?
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg
An intimate recollection of a Beat legend.
Posted inBooks, Member Pick, Nonfiction
The Holy Junk Heap
Some 300,000 Jewish documents were hidden in a closet in Cairo for hundreds of years. They were discovered by the lady adventurer twins Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson and the legendary Rabbinical scholar Solomon Schechter. Here is their story.
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Cold Rim of the World
The rise and fall of Pyramiden, a Russian mining town located in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Who Invented Skiing?
“Serik describes a hunt when Tursen skied down on a bounding deer, leaped on its back, grabbed its antlers, and wrestled it down into the snow, the animal kicking and biting. It is a scene that has been repeated for thousands of years in these mountains. Within the Altay, a handful of petroglyphs have been […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Local Leaders in China and India Shape Global Politics
All politics is local, even in the countries that are home to one-third of the world’s population. Antholis and his family traveled to China and India to explore how different regions operated, and how they each impact global politics: The questions we asked fell into three categories: How do Chinese provinces and Indian states work? […]
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
A Conversation With Writer Colm Tóibín on the ‘Close Imagining’ of Fiction
“A really good idea might come to you at night and seem really wrong in the morning. So you’re always testing things.”
