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.
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Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Uncategorized
Kelly Link Is Beloved, But Still Underrated: A Primer on My Favorite Living Short Story Writer
There’s that urge in adolescence when you feel like you discovered something, maybe a song, a book, or a painting, that resonates so deeply within you, to protect it, and keep it secret and close, so that you feel like you have claim of something wondrous and all your own. And if you share the […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
‘A Taste of Power’: The Woman Who Led the Black Panther Party
Elaine Brown was the first and only woman to lead the male-dominated Black Panther Party. She looks back on Jean Seberg, COINTELPRO, and internal divisions within the organization.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Taking the Slow Road: An Interview with Author Katherine Heiny
She published a short story in The New Yorker in 1992, then seemed to all but disappear. How author Katherine Heiny took her sweet time on the path toward publishing her new story collection.
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction, Story
For the Public Good: The Shameful History of Forced Sterilization in the U.S.
“I never figured out why they did that to me.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Decline of Book Reviewing
Hardwick’s classic 1959 essay on the dismal state of book criticism. (Robert Silvers has pointed it out as an early inspiration for founding the New York Review of Books.) For the world of books, for readers and writers, the torpor of the New York Times Book Review is more affecting. There come to mind all […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
False Confessions: NYC Still Struggles in Aftermath of Central Park Five
In the spring of 1989, five teenagers from Harlem were convicted of raping and assaulting a woman jogging in Central Park after four of the five confessed to the crime. The confession of a convicted rapist and killer named Matías Reyes overturned the five men’s convictions in 2003. Since then, the NYPD announced it would […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Last Beat
The story of Lucien Carr, who befriended Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs while he was a freshman at Columbia. The four friends had their lives changed when Carr murdered a man during his sophomore year: “The day after Carr confessed, both Kerouac and Burroughs were arrested as material witnesses. Burroughs’s father came […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The History of Cricket in the United States
The rules of the game on this side of the Atlantic were formalized in 1754, when Benjamin Franklin brought back from England a copy of the 1744 Laws, cricket’s official rule book. There is anecdotal evidence that George Washington’s troops played what they called “wickets” at Valley Forge in the summer of 1778. After the […]
Posted inMember Pick, Nonfiction
Falling: Love and Marriage in a Conservative Indian Family
“Indians don’t ‘fall,’ Debie. We don’t marry by accident. We choose.”
