In this oral history, a former sheepherder describes the loneliness and medical hardship he experienced while tending sheep in California’s Central Valley.
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Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction
From a Hawk to a Dove
Vietnam Veteran Ray Cocks, who’d eagerly enlisted in 1967, was forever changed by the realities of war.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Is the Internet Changing Time?
“Fragments of the past are for the first time on tap, not stored away in boxes,” writes Laurence Scott.
Posted inNonfiction, Op-Ed, Story
What Thomas Jefferson Taught Me About Charlottesville and America
University of Virginia grad Joshua Adams believes that if you want to understand the recent violence there, look back at history and the school’s complicated founder.
Posted inUncategorized
Industrialization and the History of the Matzo Machine
For centuries matzo was a handmade specialty, carefully rolled into a thin, cratered moon shape and pricked with a fork. Today, many Orthodox communities still make this version — called shmurah — which is supervised by a rabbi from start to finish. But industrialization in the mid–nineteenth century forever changed the matzo industry. Historians trace the first […]
Posted inEssays & Criticism, Nonfiction, Story
From a Hawk to a Dove
Vietnam Veteran Ray Cocks, who’d eagerly enlisted in 1967, was forever changed by the realities of war.
Posted inBooks, History, Nonfiction, Story
The Brief Career and Self-Imposed Exile of Jutta Hipp, Jazz Pianist
Europe’s “First Lady of Jazz” moved to New York in 1955, played for five more years, then disappeared — while royalty checks piled up with her record label.
Posted inBooks
Late in Life, Thoreau Became a Serious Darwinist
But he died before he could finish his book on natural history. As Emerson put it, Thoreau “depart[ed] out of Nature before… he has been really shown to his peers for what he is.”
Posted inBooks, Fiction, First Chapters, Story
Getting Out the Message To Save Himself
In Don Waters’ short story “Full of Days,” a grieving Las Vegas man uses an anti-abortion billboard to justify his own pained existence.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Escape From New York
The late Ellen Willis—a legendary feminist and cultural critic—writes about loneliness, human connection and aging radicals in the context of a solo cross-country Greyhound bus trip. The essay originally appeared as a 1981 cover story in the Village Voice, and was later reprinted in The Essential Ellen Willis.
