Tag: Oxford American
Living the American Dream in Comer, Georgia: The Garden of Refugees
The story of Eh Kaw Htoo, a Karen refugee from Myanmar — a man who “extolled the redneck’s work ethic” and helped build a community of 150 Karens who sustain one another by living frugally and sharing the bounty of the land in the rural community of Comer, Georgia.
How the Blues Conquered Tokyo
I couldn’t quite figure out why Japanese listeners had come to appreciate and savor the blues in the way that they seemed to—lavishly, devotedly. Blues is still an outlier genre in Japan, but it’s revered, topical, present. I’d spent my first couple of days in Tokyo hungrily trawling the city’s many excellent record stores, marveling […]
On Falsely Laying Claim to a Literary Lineage
The first time I admitted that yes, I was related to Francis Scott Key, it came as a shock, even to me, because, of course, I was lying. While my other college friends experimented with drugs and God, I experimented with genealogy. Soon, I found myself trying to learn to pretend to be a writer […]
Is ‘Trash Food’ a Thing? On Food, Stigma, Class, and Connection
Chris Offutt writes in Oxford American
on the concept of “white trash,” the seemingly immutable class boundaries that divide us, and food’s power to widen the chasm or bridge the gap.
The Lives of Nuns: A Reading List
Life inside the cloister is fascinating. Poverty, silence, chastity, obedience: these are not characteristics most of us would devote our lives to. These women find freedom in strictures and structure. What is it like inside the convent walls? Here are five pieces explore the lives of nuns and those inspired by their works.
‘Spanglish Is Not Random’
Spanglish is not random. It is not simply a piecemeal cobbling-together, a collecting of scraps of random vocabulary into a raggedy orphan of a sentence. It has logic and rules, and more interestingly and importantly, it embodies a constantly shifting and intimate morphology of miscegenation.
‘I Want to Be Eaten By Vultures’
In the Oxford American, Alex Mar goes to San Marcos, Texas to visit the Forensic Anthropology Center, which contains the largest of America’s five “body farms.” Body farms are research facilities where families or individuals can donate their bodies for scientific studies, like how our bodies decay when left out in the sun and exposed to nature for weeks at a time.
When Instruments Are Replaced by Computer Software
At Oxford American, writer and musician Ginger Dellenbaugh looks at how the steel guitar established itself as an American instrument, and why there may be so few people mastering it today: Recently, I met a friend at his studio in East Nashville to listen to some of his new demos. The second track featured a […]
A Longreads Guest Pick: Drew Grossman on 'Game of Tribes'
Drew Grossman is a writer living in Washington, D.C. His work has appeared on MensHealth.com, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald, and his hometown paper, The Tallahassee Democrat. My Longreads pick this week is Diane Roberts’s ‘Game of Tribes’ for The Oxford American. The piece is an excerpt from a longer project, a book on […]
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A look at how residents in Arkansas are dealing with the health implications of drilling for natural gas in their communities: Keith didn’t want to think about Iraq, but the tankers and water trucks reminded him of the vehicles he’d seen in Iraq’s oil fields. In Iraq, if an eighteen-wheeler pulled up on him, it […]
