Yesterday I saw my appendix. It was pink and tiny, quite hard to see, but how interesting to be introduced to it for the first time. In for a routine colonoscopy (my fourth, on account of a family history), I refused sedation as I always do, and I had the enormous thrill of witnessing parts […]
Search results
Posted inFeature
The Life and Murder of Stella Walsh, Intersex Olympic Champion
Eighty years ago, in Berlin, Stella Walsh won her second Olympic medal. Decades later, Walsh’s murder and subsequent autopsy threw the legacy of track’s first female superstar into turmoil.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
The Secret Nazi Attempt to Breed the Perfect Horse
The bestselling author of ‘The Eighty Dollar Champion’ describes the Nazis’ secret stud farm, where dubious visionaries imagined a breed of perfect (and perfectly white) horse.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
A Stranger in the World: The Memoir of a Musician on Tour
The Hold Steady’s Franz Nicolay on DIY touring in the punk underground of the former Soviet Union.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Mass Extinction: The Early Years
A quick rundown of the ecocidal empires that came before us.
Posted inBlog Post, Nonfiction
Beautiful Nowheres: ‘No Man’s Sky’ and the 500th Anniversary of ‘Utopia’
Five centuries after Thomas More’s classic was first published, we still dabble in perfect-world-building.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Law Is Human and Flawed
What is lawful is not always identical to what is right. Sometimes it falls to a judge to align the two. Ward’s judgment runs to more than eighty closely typed pages. It is beautifully written, delicate and humane, philosophically astute, ethically sensitive, and scholarly, with a wide range of historical and legal references. The best […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Same-Sex Marriage, America, and You: A Reading List
In the following list, I share different perspectives about same-sex marriage (all written by members of the LGBTQ+ community), as well as Pride, religious opinions, family and stereotypes.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
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 […]
