A reading list could never do author Roxane Gay justice. For one thing, she’s incredibly prolific. She writes, edits, teaches and tweets. Within the past few months, she’s garnered acclaim for her intense novel, An Untamed State, and her collection of essays, Bad Feminist. These are just the facts. I don’t remember discovering Gay’s work. I remember requesting […]
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The Remnants of Maycomb: What Happened to Harper Lee’s Hometown
Maybe it wasn’t just Nelle’s insecurity that held her back from becoming “the Jane Austen of South Alabama,” but also the dismaying decline of the “small-town middle-class” idyll she’d staked her career on documenting. She had, after all, written a historical novel. To Kill a Mockingbird was filmed not in Monroeville but on an L.A. lot. There […]
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How to Make Friends and Win Over Bodega Owners
Grabbing the attention of consumers was a big part of the game. Vita Coco bought a van, painted it ocean blue and loaded it with free samples and with women who would jump out and Hula-Hoop on the streets. Zico hired college students to roll coolers around the city. Bodega owners were often the toughest […]
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Could the Ideal Mormon City Be One of Inclusion?
In a recent piece for The Big Roundtable, Daniel A. Gross profiled Alasdair Ekpenyong, a gay Mormon struggling to make sense of his sexuality within the context of his faith. Alasdair sought answers in many venues, including alternative communities and Mormon history. From the story: That winter, Alasdair began to write a series of academic essays about the […]
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Rebecca Solnit on the Political and the Trivial
Apolitical is a political position, yes, and a dreary one. The choice by a lot of young writers to hide out among dinky, dainty, and even trivial topics—I see it as, at its best, an attempt by young white guys to be anti-hegemonic, unimposing. It relinquishes power—but it also relinquishes the possibility of being engaged […]
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John McPhee on One Word You Couldn't Publish in The New Yorker
Fuck, fucker, fuckest; fuckest, fucker, fuck. In all my days, I had found that four-letter word—with its silent “c” and its quartzite “k”—more shocking than a thunderclap. My parents thought it was a rhetorical crime. Mr. Shawn actually seemed philosophical about its presence in the language, but not in his periodical. My young daughters, evidently, […]
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‘Orange Is the New Black’ as a Trojan Horse for Prison Reform
When Piper optioned her book to Jenji Kohan, the creator of Weeds, a number of people were asked to sign over something called “life rights.” In short: Some version of our lives could be depicted on the show, and we each agreed not to sue its creators if, for example, the character based on one […]
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Here's One Way to Ace a Public School's Standardized Test
When a problem exists in Philadelphia schools, it generally exists in other large urban schools across the nation. One of those problems—shared by districts in New York, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and other major cities—is that many schools don’t have enough money to buy books. The School District of Philadelphia recently tweeted a photo of […]
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Solitude, and the Contrast Between the Outside World and Our Inner Selves
There can be something enjoyable, even revelatory about that feeling of self-protection, which is why we seek out circumstances in which we can feel more acutely the contrast between the outside world and our inner selves. Woolf was fascinated by city life—by the feeling of solitude-on-display that the sidewalk encourages, and by the way that […]
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Calling Their Mothers From the Front Lines
And in the middle of this tumult, I came back to the relative calm of my hotel room in the Hotel Palestine. There was no electricity. Sunlight slanted horizontally into the dusty, dim corridors and I saw at the end of the passage, outside my room, two figures silhouetted against the white glare of the […]