John Jeremiah Sullivan’s profile of American folk singer, composer, and MacArthur Fellow Rihannon Giddens includes a history of the influential, but little known black antebellum fiddler Frank Johnson, as well as the 1898 racial massacre in Wilmington, North Carolina.
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Posted inArts & Culture, Highlight, Quote Posts, Quotes
Willie Nelson’s 50-year Love Affair with Trigger, His Faithful Guitar
“A guitar sounds better as it gets older, just like a Stradivarius does.”
Posted inBooks, investigations, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘The Most Versatile Criminal In History’
Journalist Evan Ratliff has uncovered the shocking reach of Paul Le Roux’s criminal enterprise — a global network of pawns, most of whom were unaware of the full extent of the empire.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Vessel of Antiquity
For musical performance artist Leon Redbone, the past was all the material he needed, except his own, which he replaced with a persona. “I don’t have a past,” he said. “The past begins tomorrow.” Strange enough to earn comparisons to Frank Zappa and Tom Waits, Redbone often got shelved in record stores’ rock sections, even […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Science & Nature, Story
‘I Cannot Name Any Emotion That Is Uniquely Human.’
According to primatologist Frans de Waal, we don’t like to admit that animals, especially apes, have emotions just like ours, and science has become better at studying apes’ behaviors than human ones.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind
Rachel Kushner profiles scholar and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
Posted inNonfiction
‘There’s Virtually No Conversation In Chicago … About the Aftershocks of the Violence.’
In “An American Summer,” journalist Alex Kotlowitz tries to report on gun deaths on Chicago’s South Side with the same attention to survivors, anniversaries, and aftershocks that is paid to mass shootings.
Posted inReading List
This Month in Books: The Decameron Is Online
We can all quarantine alone, together, in one big villa in the cloud.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘In a Marriage, You Grow Around Each Other’: An Interview with Tessa Hadley
Tessa Hadley on gaining the sense of authority she needed to write fiction, the authors whose work opens the door for her to write, and the way we are formed by our connections with other people.
Posted inBooks, Fiction, Food, Profiles & Interviews, Story, Writing
Helen Oyeyemi on ‘Gingerbread,’ Fairy Tales, and What Self-Branding Is Doing to Childhood
“I was thinking a lot about childhood as this special status, an almost endangered status … that is eroded the more that we start thinking of ourselves as these units of value and worrying about what we’re worth.”
