Because the area is full of Buddhists, most people stayed positive and were not shocked by the realization that death is inevitable. The earthquake was actually a great Buddhist teaching that everything is an illusion and things are never as they seem to be. Like a rope on the ground can be mistaken for a […]
quotes
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Finding a ‘Prepper’ to Go on the Record Is No Easy Task
Preppers are, not surprisingly, a paranoid bunch. Locating people willing to speak with me about their habits was more challenging than finding vegans at a gun range. After emailing a dozen members of Northern Illinois Preppers, a Meetup online community whose membership has grown from about 110 to more than 150 in the past six […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A Young Student Athlete’s Depression, Hidden on Social Media
The day after Madison jumped, Jim walked to the top of the parking garage. He read the phrase, She had wings on. He spoke with Madison’s friends. He compiled clues. Then he stopped. He could spend his life trying, in vain, to make his child whole again, he thought. Or he could work to keep […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Erin Lee Carr’s Moving Tribute to Her Father, David Carr
The other day I got some good news and, wanting to share it, reflexively typed “dad” into my phone. There are moments in grief when the finality sets in, and here it was: I would never be able to hear his voice again. But I’ve realized, strangely, that instead of resenting the Internet, I’m grateful […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The New York Times Investigates the Exploitation of Nail Salon Workers
Salon workers describe a culture of subservience that extends far beyond the pampering of customers. Tips or wages are often skimmed or never delivered, or deducted as punishment for things like spilled bottles of polish. At her Harlem salon, Ms. Cacho said she and her colleagues had to buy new clothes in whatever color the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Technology, Privacy, and Searchable Text
The Defense Department, through its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), started funding academic and commercial research into speech recognition in the early 1970s. What emerged were several systems to turn speech into text, all of which slowly but gradually improved as they were able to work with more data and at faster speeds. In a brief […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Price We Pay for Mass Incarceration
Put another way, the supposition on which our mass incarceration is premised—namely, that it materially reduces crime—is, at best, a hunch. Yet the price we pay for acting on this hunch is enormous. This is true in the literal sense: it costs more than $80 billion a year to run our jails and prisons. It […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Romantic Love: The Dominant Subject Matter of Western Popular Music
[Ted] Gioia shows that song lyrics about love, sex, marriage, and fertility can be traced all the way back to the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians, and that once Jewish and Christian religious leaders came to terms with the iron determination of their own people to write and sing about romantic love, it quickly emerged as […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
The Secret to Honesty in Writing
“It didn’t occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret.” –Author Louise Erdrich, in the Paris Review. Read the interview
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Unapologetic Women
The Secret to Honesty in Writing
“It didn’t occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret.” –Author Louise Erdrich, in the Paris Review. Read the interview