A reporter for the Baltimore American was there when the coffin was first re-opened, where it was inspected by a small gaggle of curious onlookers. According to him, the skeleton was “almost in perfect condition, and lying with the long bony hands reposing one upon the other,” while the skull had “some little hair…still clinging near […]
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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 […]
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How Many Gigs Does It Take to Make It in NYC?
The gig economy (“a phrase which encompasses both the related collaborative economy and sharing economy”) is inescapable.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Proustian Powers of Ice Cream
Ice cream is Proustian. One bite can send you time-traveling decades back, to a hot summer day, when you walked barefoot on shell-dappled Gulf sands, vanilla ice cream dripping over the sides of a cone and onto your fingers. Maybe it was a reward for the first time you lost a tooth, a sweet, cold dish […]
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Jessica Hopper on Being a Writer Who’s ‘Rough Around the Edges’
Jessica Hopper is a the author of The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, editor of The Pitchfork Review and a legend in her own right.
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When Conservation Threatens Indigenous Peoples
But the Maasai of Loliondo are not alone in disputing these supposed benefits. Worldwide, 8 million square miles—a landmass almost as large as the entire African continent—have been classified as protected areas by governments and conservation groups. In turn, the locals have mostly been pushed off their lands. Though no one formally counts people displaced […]
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Educating the Imagination: Kenneth Koch on Poetry
I was brought up in Cincinnati, Ohio. My parents were very nice. The first time I wrote a poem, my mother gave me a big kiss and said, “I love you.” The whole idea of writing poetry had a lot to do with escaping, escaping from the bourgeois society of Cincinnati, Ohio, escaping from any […]
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How a ’12 Angry Men’ Parody Emerged from Amy Schumer’s Writing Room
Each episode of Inside Amy Schumer usually contains a number of sketches, but last week the entire show was composed of a single extremely ambitious sketch. Bryan Moylan recently profiled Jessi Klein, the show’s head writer and co-executive producer of the show in New York Magazine. In the excerpt below, Moylan provides context for how the much-talked-about episode came together: Tuesday night’s […]
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Will Technology Eventually Replace Marc Andreessen?
One challenge for Andreessen is whether venture itself has a skills problem. If software is truly eating the world, wouldn’t venture capital be on the menu? The AngelList platform now allows investors to fund startups online. Its co-founder Naval Ravikant said that “future companies will require more two-hundred-thousand-dollar checks and way fewer guys on Sand […]
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The High-Stress Life of a First Responder
You don’t know what it’s like to be an emergency services provider until you’ve stood in the piss-soaked bedroom of a house and watched a team of medics try to revive an old, lonely guy though 15 minutes of automated CPR. It’s a small part of the job, but unavoidable. When the call goes off […]