“Although the world has made space for more diverse women, we are still expected to fill the role of the one who wants to be loved, to be a mother when perhaps we only ever wanted to paint, to write, to explore the world alone, on our own terms.”
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Posted inBooks, Commentary
This Week in Books: Farewell Longreads! I’m Taking This Rodeo to Substack.
To read my “This Week in Books” newsletter in the future, follow me on substack.
Posted inNonfiction
How the Cosby Story Finally Went Viral — And Why It Took So Long
A journalist who reported on the accusations long before they went viral wonders, “What kind of profession am I in, where stories have no logical reason for unfolding?”
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Science & Nature, Story
Why Bugs Deserve Our Respect
Fruit flies helped us win six Nobel prizes in medicine. Architects have been inspired by termite hills. Ecologist Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson explains why bugs are so essential to the world we live in.
Posted inHistory, Nonfiction, Quotes
Did You Happen to See the Most Interesting Man in the World? (He’s In Room 328)
Libraries contain more than books — they have archives, and the archivists want to help you explore them.
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘The Trains Are Slower Because They Slowed the Trains Down’
In 1995, a Manhattan-bound J train crossing the Williamsburg Bridge rear-ended an M train, killing the J train operator and injuring more than fifty passengers. New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has run the trains at suboptimal speeds ever since, while publicly blaming the systemwide slowdown on budget cuts and euphemisms for overcrowding. Village Voice transit reporter Aaron Gordon traces how […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Passing as Privileged
A personal essay in which Narratively deputy editor Lilly Dancyger writes about dealing with people’s mistaken assumptions about the economics of her upbringing. A high-school dropout who later worked her way through college and graduate school, Dancyger grew up poor — the daughter of a single mother who was a recovering heroin addict. In New […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Gotham Gave Us Trump
New York’s tumultuous `70s and `80s taught Donald Trump about the power of the politics of fear — and very little about what makes cities work.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Determined to Hitch a Ride on the Greatest Rig in America
An excerpt of The Stowaway: A Young Man’s Extraordinary Adventure to Antarctica, about Billy Gawronski, a 17-year-old who was hell-bent on stowing away to Antarctica on Richard Evelyn Byrd’s 1928 expedition.
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Reading List
A Genre of Myths: A Jazz Reading List
Created in New Orleans and played around the world, the music we call jazz is filled with genius, legend, and tragedy.
