In Ling Ma’s “Severance” — a novel she began to write after getting laid off, while living partly on severance pay — the characters keep going to work, even though they know it’s the end of the world.
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Posted inNonfiction
Total Depravity: The Origins of the Drug Epidemic in Appalachia Laid Bare
In an excerpt from his essay collection, Australian journalist Richard Cooke reports on the American opioid crisis through the astonished eyes of a foreigner visiting steel and coal country.
Posted inCrime, Feature, Food, Nonfiction, Story
The Caviar Con
When caviar-crazed Eastern Europeans flocked to Warsaw, Missouri to poach eggs from a vulnerable species of fish, federal agents went undercover and spent two years to build a case against them.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Can Amazon’s Alexa Be Your Friend?
A look at the rise of digital assistants, and how Alexa is not only getting smarter, but becoming an emotional companion for people who face loneliness and social anxiety.
Posted inArts & Culture, History, Science & Nature, Story
The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Pearls
Born from irritation and intrusion, luminous and complex, surprisingly durable: pearls are rich with symbolism and saturated with pain.
Posted inNonfiction
A Dispatch From the Fast-Paced, Makeshift World of High-End Catering
The unsung heroes of the food world battle against time and chaos, cooking haute cuisine over lit cans of Sterno in the gloomy back hallways of New York’s civic landmarks.
Posted inBooks, Culture, Feature, History, Profiles & Interviews, Story
The Precarity of Everything: On Millennial (Blacks and) Blues
Reniqua Allen — the author of It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America — on Black millennials, millennial burnout, and hope in a time of uncertainty.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Sarah Perry on ‘Melmoth,’ Monsters, and Making Her Readers Feel Responsible for Mass Atrocity
“It was important to me that the ‘villains’ in the book were ordinary people, because readers are ordinary people, and people who do terrible things are often ordinary people.”
Posted inNonfiction
Nashville contra Jaws, 1975
In their time, “Jaws” and “Nashville” were regarded as Watergate films, and both were in production as the Watergate disaster played its final act.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, History, Profiles & Interviews, Science & Nature, Story
Namwali Serpell on Doing the Responsible Thing — Writing an Irresponsible Novel
“I joke that this is the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.”
