Rebecca Hiscott is a graduate student at NYU and a features writer for Mashable. I’m still marveling at ‘Him and Her’ by Mark Harris from the Oct. 14 issue of New York magazine. The piece is both a nuanced profile of director Spike Jonze — despite Joaquin Phoenix’s stony-faced cameo on the cover — and […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
When Heartbreak Turns Into Inspiration
“What Roosevelt sheepishly omits is that he started working on the book just after Thanksgiving as a way to cope with a broken heart. He’d fallen head over heels for Alice Hathaway Lee, a golden-haired girl with a sharp mind who loved to laugh. ‘As long as I live, I shall never forget how sweetly […]
Posted inUncategorized
What It's Like to Grow Up Hapa
“The question of nationality perplexes my little brain. Why are we what we are? I and my brothers and sisters. Why did God make us to be hooted and stared at? Papa is English, mamma is Chinese. Why couldn’t we have been either one thing or the other? Why is my mother’s race despised? I […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Robert Redford, Golden Boy
A look back the actor’s career—and his shirtless ping-pong photos: “Redford comes into the shop where homely Streisand works, and she’s all, ‘Look who’s here, America the Beautiful,’ and you’re all, YES, TRUER WORDS HAVE NEVER BEEN SAID. But then you get suckerpunched by how effectively this movie convinces you that Redford would fall for […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Summer of ’38
[Fiction] A Spanish woman revisits a wartime romance: “The week after Ana had mentioned the man from the electric company, Montse saw him waiting at the front door of her building when she came home with a bag of fruit. She did know him, she realized; he was someone she often saw on the street. […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction
How Quentin Tarantino created the film that launched his career and redefined movies in the 1990s: “Just seven years earlier, in 1986, Tarantino was a 23-year-old part-time actor and high-school dropout, broke, without an apartment of his own, showering rarely. With no agent, he sent out scripts that never got past low-level readers. ‘Too vile, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Murder of an Idealist
The life and last days of Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed during a Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya: “It’s curious that a kid from California who grew up knowing nothing about the Arab world would come to devote his career to the Middle East and North Africa—as opposed to, […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Confessions of an Ex-Mormon
A personal history of joining, and leaving, the Mormon Church: “When I meet with the first two landlords in Beverly Hills, they’ve already seen my credit files and don’t seem to want to know much more about me other than why I’m standing on their property. At my third stop, I speak into an intercom […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
What to Do?
[Fiction] A man’s romance with a psychic: “The psychic from the Third Base suckered drunk-me into getting a reading: twenty buckaroos. She had a table set up and was circling the bar in her hoop earrings and a fake mole that was supposed to be gypsy somehow, looking for customers. Real gypsies have a hair […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Romance Novels, The Last Great Bastion Of Underground Writing
The art of writing romance novels: “The romance heroine, though possessed of heart, intelligence and beauty, is at the mercy of her own self-criticism most of the time. As the story begins, she is scared and isolated, poor, or abandoned, or lonely. Not infrequently, the book opens with her having just suffered some terrible loss; […]
