Sculpture has always been a controversial art form in Iran, but that is where Parviz Tanavoli has found his greatest inspiration.
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Posted inNonfiction, Story
The Mountain Carver
Sculpture has always been a controversial art form in Iran, but that is where Parviz Tanavoli has found his greatest inspiration.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘Arrested Development’ Creator Mitch Hurwitz on His First Encounter with Michael Cera
“Michael Cera, I had seen him in a pilot and I reached out through the casting director, like, ‘there was this kid in this pilot, can you please try to track him down.’ Two weeks went by, and we’d seen all these — you know, kid actors in Hollywood, a lot of them come up […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Signs of Change on the Streets of Baghdad
Indeed, for a city that only last summer feared it would be overrun by jihadis, Baghdad feels uncannily lacking in trauma. Perhaps Iraqis have learned how to live with their fears, but ISIS feels more threatening in European capitals than it does in Baghdad. Too complacently, Iraqis talk about ISIS in the past tense, as […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What Happens When Your Writing Professor Is William Zinsser
The weekly writing assignments—thousand-word limit, a safeguard for Bill’s sanity—required us to try our hands at a wide range of forms: humor, interviewing, travel, science, sports, criticism, editorials. This regimen inevitably yielded the occasional face-first failure, soon to be transmuted by pedagogical alchemy into an edifying failure. At the end of class, Bill would return […]
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
A Woman on the Margins
An interview with Vivian Gornick about the problem with writing programs, the memoir’s potential for dishonesty, and finding her way as a writer.
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews
A Woman on the Margins
An interview with Vivian Gornick about the problem with writing programs, the memoir’s potential for dishonesty, and finding her way as a writer.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Privacy vs. Equality in the Supreme Court
There is a lesson in the past fifty years of litigation. When the fight for equal rights for women narrowed to a fight for reproductive rights, defended on the ground of privacy, it weakened. But when the fight for gay rights became a fight for same-sex marriage, asserted on the ground of equality, it got […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Mysteries of the Universe, Still Out of Our Reach
Cosmology’s hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don’t know what came before it. They don’t know whether the Big Bang was the beginning, or merely one of many beginnings. Something entirely unimaginable might have preceded it. Cosmologists don’t know […]
Posted inFiction, Quotes
John Keene’s ‘Rivers,’ A Speculative Huck Finn-Inspired Short Story
Huckleberry seized my hand, clasping it so tight he brought back in a quick flood of feelings those years with the Widow Watson, and whispered as if he wanted only me and not his friend to hear, “You take care of yourself, Jim, and keep out of all that trouble, please, cause this world is […]