“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 […]
quotes
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The Anatomy of a Tweet
“For all the possibilities of APIs, there are also limits. Another tweet field, ‘withheld_copyright,’ if set to ‘true,’ lets you know that a tweet is in trouble—that its content has raised flags and hackles over copyright. The text of the tweet, in that case, may be suppressed. The ‘withheld_in_countries’ field can provide a list of […]
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An SNL Sketch Comes Down to the Wire
“As Rhys was watching down the final cut, he noticed two errors: one shot slipped into the cut without being ‘un-squeezed’ and another repositioned shot had lost its repo. We all know that these kinds of errors happen all the time, but they rarely happen when you are literally gun-to-the-head, minutes away from a live […]
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Building a Car from Scratch
“Kevin turned serious for a moment and admitted that, yes, he was ‘paranoid’ about something breaking. It wasn’t just the welds. Much of the car was made from used parts that Kevin and his friends had scavenged from local junkyards. The rear suspension came from a Dodge Neon. The struts were a combination of Nissan, […]
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The Politics of Human Waste
“Shit, for some, has had curative or life-extending properties. Martin Luther is reputed to have swallowed a spoonful of his own every day. Laporte writes that an 18th-century woman explicitly hired a young man to divest himself of his shit every night so that she might spread it on her face. That was apparently the […]
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The Questions We Don’t Ask Our Grandparents
“We see our parents aging before our eyes, but we regard our grandparents as such oaks, their mortality not once entering our thoughts because they have always, to us, been old. By the time I began to realize the urgency of learning about him, he was gone. I never had the chance — or, to […]
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How a San Francisco Startup Dies
“In meetings on Sand Hill Road, Latour says, nearly everyone expressed enthusiasm for Everpix’s product. But one by one, they turned him down. After two meetings with one well-known firm, a partner sent Latour an email. ‘You guys seem to be a spectacularly talented team and some informal reference checking confirmed that, but everyone here […]
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An Encounter With a Serial Killer
“You blink. You look again. You look at other photos. You wonder if you’re being melodramatic, if your memory is faulty. You wonder if people will believe you, or simply think your imagination has run away with you. You wonder if there is a class of neurotic people who make up false accounts of run-ins […]
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Why Children of Immigrants Often Involuntarily Lose a Language
“First-language loss occurs almost across the board by immigrants’ third generation, Light says. That is, Daniel’s children would most commonly be the ones experiencing this issue, with Daniel as a bilingual father. Factors such as home life, the concentration of an immigrant community and the length of time away from a native-speaking environment determine the […]
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The Vanity Fair Gossip Column That Wasn't
“Senior editor Walter Clemons recruited Truman Capote to write a gossip column for the magazine, which created more turbulence at 350 Madison Avenue—Condé Nast headquarters at the time—and more fodder for the press. ‘Capote finally consented and wrote one,’ Lawson recalls. ‘And at one of the meetings everybody except me said, “Oh, we can’t publish […]