Roald Dahl, the whimsical and wicked mind behind Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and other famous children’s literature, would have turned 100 on September 13, 2016. Here are seven stories about the man behind these tales.
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Posted inBusiness & Tech, Nonfiction, Reading List
We’re Living in the Golden Age of the Corporate Takedown
Why do we love reading about CEOs behaving badly? Perhaps it’s because we identify with their exhausted workers.
Posted inBooks
Late in Life, Thoreau Became a Serious Darwinist
But he died before he could finish his book on natural history. As Emerson put it, Thoreau “depart[ed] out of Nature before… he has been really shown to his peers for what he is.”
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
After Marriage Equality, to Party, or to Protest?
Spenser Mestel recalls the emotionally complicated day, two years ago, when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction
Snow, Death and Politics
While snowed in on the West Coast, Frances Badalamenti grapples alone with her father’s death on the other side of what feels like a dying country.
Posted inDiscussions, Nonfiction, Quotes, Reading List
On Being Fat
Sara Benincasa’s essay “Why Am I So Fat?” was one of our top five reads last week, and with good reason — it was honest and cutting in all the right ways. It was brash and unapologetic and funny as hell (and also suggests that perhaps Fader was slightly premature in declaring, earlier this year, that […]
Posted inNonfiction
Hidebound: The Grisly Invention of Parchment
While most of the Old World was writing on papyrus, bamboo, and silk, Europe carved its own gruesome path through the history books.
Posted inDiscussions, Story
‘No One Should be Doomed to Just One Story’: An ‘S-Town’ Roundtable
How we feel about a person’s privacy seems to correlate with how much control they have in the decision to open up.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction
Thank You, Jon Gnagy: An Appreciation of a Predecessor to Bob Ross
Ned Stuckey-French reflects on the host of Learn to Draw, the “middlebrow” instructional art show he loved as a kid.
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction
Writing Our America
“Despite the headlines that came after the election calling this country ‘Trump’s America’—and there were many—I won’t call it that, or see it that way. And regardless of your politics I’ll ask you to join me. This is our America. It’s our America to write in, and our America to write.”
