Posted inEditor's Pick

Tale Spin

What is storytelling? Megan Marz explores stories, narratives, blog posts, and vibes in this Real Life essay. While I could recognize that blog posts were narrative constructions, and many of them had conventional arcs, they seemed to break with a tradition that to me defined what stories were. They appeared to leak literary expression back […]

Posted inEditor's Pick

The Korean Immigrant and Michigan Farm Boy Who Taught Americans How to Cook Chow Mein

In 1922, two college classmates in Detroit — a Korean immigrant named Ilhan New and an American named Wally Smith — founded La Choy, a company that mass-produced Chinese food products. One hundred years later, to Chinese Americans the brand is “synonymous with cultural inauthenticity, even appropriation.” But, as Cathy Erway explores for Taste, the […]

Posted inEditor's Pick

‘What’s Covid?’ Why People at America’s Hardest-Partying Lake Are Not About to Get Vaccinated

“Like other places with low vaccination rates, there is a deep distrust of authority that exists among those at the Lake of the Ozarks. Politicians have agendas, the press loves controversy, even data can’t be believed. Some here cast hospitalization spikes as fictionalized. Others spin conspiracy theories about microchips.”