“When Mary Margaret Vojtko died last September—penniless and virtually homeless and eighty-three years old, having been referred to Adult Protective Services because the effects of living in poverty made it seem to some that she was incapable of caring for herself—it made the news because she was a professor.” So begins the dark tale of […]
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‘I Did Not Have a Culture of Scholastic High Achievement Around Me’
Compared with my classmates on the second tier, my test scores were on the lower end. Each week, in my literature class, we were responsible for the recitation of some French poems (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Lamartine) from memory, and each day we had to recite a stanza. This sort of exercise may well be familiar to […]
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * * 1. Whoever Saves a Life Matthieu Aikins | Matter | Sept. 15, 2014 | 37 minutes (9,338 words) Aikins follows an urban rescue […]
Loneliness and Solitude: A Reading List
When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to […]
First Chapters: The Veins of the Ocean, by Patricia Engel
How we became a prison family.
The Adjunct Crisis: A Reading List
“When Mary Margaret Vojtko died last September—penniless and virtually homeless and eighty-three years old, having been referred to Adult Protective Services because the effects of living in poverty made it seem to some that she was incapable of caring for herself—it made the news because she was a professor.” So begins the dark tale of […]
Why So Many Bottled and Canned Coffee Drinks Taste So Bad
It took Blue Bottle a year and a half to get to the point where they could regularly produce iced coffee at this scale. The seed of the idea was a can of cold cappuccino that James Freeman had on a plane to New York in late 2011. “I got this canned cappucino for, like, […]
Oh, the Humanities! A Reading List Pertaining to the English Major
In college, I rearranged my majors and minors, all in the humanities, for years. I loved everything. Finally, I majored in English. It was fate—second-grade me was constantly in trouble for sneaking books under her desk. Majoring in English was both the joy and bane of my life. I struggled with a Faulkner-heavy Southern Lit course, […]
The Mask of Deception: The Ultimate Test to My Recovery From Porn Addiction
Novelist Benjamin Obler was feeling secure in his recovery from porn addiction. Then along came Franny, to test it.
Atomic Summer: An Essay by Joni Tevis
Buddy Holly, John Wayne, and the A-Bomb.

