“He read a legend of a girl whose father took pains as she should never go out into the world. But one day she wandered through a gap in the wall before her father found her. ‘What is that creature with fluffy hair that goes baa?’ ‘It is a sheep, my daughter.’ ‘And what is […]
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Celebrating Singlehood and Reclaiming the Word ‘Spinster’
An interview with Kate Bolick about the single women in history who helped her understand how she could live on her own terms.
The Craft of Poetry: A Semester with Allen Ginsberg
An intimate recollection of a Beat legend.
The Art of Authenticity: A Conversation with PostSecret’s Frank Warren
“I feel like PostSecret is almost like an anti-Facebook. It’s the true story that you would normally never share in a public arena.”
The Philosophy of French Society
“Of course, since Descartes and the 17th Century there have been other French philosophers and many of them have turned their attention to the processes of human thought but the Cartesian legacy is still very important in the French intellectual tradition. In a Cartesian society, everything is ordered according to clear, precise, mathematical, scientific principles, […]
The 2014 Pulitzer Prize Winners
This year’s Pulitzer Prize winners are out: The Washington Post and The Guardian shared a Pulitzer for public service for their reporting on the Edward Snowden leaks and widespread NSA surveillance, the Boston Globe was honored for its coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, Chris Hamby of the Center for Public Integrity won for his black […]
How Much My Novel Cost Me
Writer Emily Gould on writing books, going into debt and navigating relationships. An excerpt from MFA VS NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction: It was more like the failure occurred in tiny increments over the course of two years, after which it was too late to develop a solid Plan B. I spent some […]
David Foster Wallace and the Nature of Fact
On David Foster Wallace, storytelling and the slippery line between fact and fiction: Before he sat down with the best tennis player on the planet for a noonday interview in the middle of the 2006 Wimbledon fortnight, David Foster Wallace prepared a script. Atop a notebook page he wrote, “R.Federer Interview Qs.” and below he […]
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 […]
Ghosting: Confessions of a WikiLeaks Ghostwriter
Andrew O’Hagan, in the London Review of Books, recounts the disastrous experience of trying to ghostwrite the autobiography of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. (The publisher later released an unauthorized early draft of the book): I wrote through the night to assemble what we had. The thinness could become a kind of statement, I asserted; it […]
