My old boss is a sucker for good endings, and he would send us far and wide to find just the right anecdote. In 2011, a worker from a Pennsylvania firm whose drilling technology helped save the Chilean miners said, “We proved that Center Rock is a little company, but we do big things.” The President loved the quote, and turned it into an entire ending about American greatness and aspiration.
Search results
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
'Solzhenitsyn Was My Virgil'
I read far and wide during my ten-year bit. I read all of the longest works of the world, the thousands of pages of Proust and Musil and Joyce and Tolstoy and David Foster Wallace. And I could follow whatever interested me at the time. I acquired a taste for Sir Richard Burton’s 19th century […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Seven Stories for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
Below are seven stories about (or by) Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., exploring different facets of his life and legacy.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Meals Behind Bars: A Reading List
Three of these pieces look at what mealtime is like on the inside, from an examination of chow hall food to stories of inmates’ ad-hoc cell-made meals to an in-depth look at a commissary food that’s both dietary supplement and currency for thousands of inmates. A fourth adds a different dimension, revealing how some of the foods on our own tables are the product of prison labor.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Seven Stories for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
Below are seven stories about (or by) Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., exploring different facets of his life and legacy.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Our Music, Our Lives: A Reading List
Turn the music up and tune into these five articles. 1. “The Soundtrack to My Late Blooming Sexual Awakening: A Round Table.” (Rachel Vorona Cote, Kirsten Schofield, Sarah Seltzer, and Lindsay King-Miller, The Hairpin, August 2014) What maelstrom of musicians is this?! These four authors elaborate on everyone from Usher to Fiona Apple as they reminisce […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Our Music, Our Lives: A Reading List
Turn the music up and tune into these five articles. 1. “The Soundtrack to My Late Blooming Sexual Awakening: A Round Table.” (Rachel Vorona Cote, Kirsten Schofield, Sarah Seltzer, and Lindsay King-Miller, The Hairpin, August 2014) What maelstrom of musicians is this?! These four authors elaborate on everyone from Usher to Fiona Apple as they reminisce […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Strange and Mysterious Death of Mrs. Jerry Lee Lewis
In this classic 1984 essay—reprinted on The Daily Beast—Richard Ben Cramer wonders if Jerry Lee Lewis got away with his wife’s murder. Jerry Lee wasn’t showing his moods the night of that first party. A great party, Shawn told her friends. Actually, it was just a few drinks in his suite. A couple of other […]
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews
How Karina Longworth Is Reimagining Classic Hollywood—and the Podcast—in ‘You Must Remember This’
“I have consciously tried to refocus my attention away from being a film critic and toward being a film historian.”
Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Fullness of a Moment
Half a century ago, the Hall of New York State Environment in the American Museum of Natural History was not only the future of museum design, but also, one man hoped, the future of democracy itself.
