Once the lords of East Africa, the Maasai have been close to peerless in the modern age for maintaining the continuity of their traditions—traditions now imperiled by the tentacles of the market and by technology, as cell phones and cheap Chinese motorcycles, like the one we rode, upend the very possibility of isolation. Compulsory and […]
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Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Dilemma the Food Movement is Facing: Can We Really Be 'Conscientious Carnivores?'
The dream of the “Food Movement” is for all meat to be humanely raised and locally sourced so we can all be “conscientious carnivores.” In The American Scholar, James McWilliams looks at a dilemma the Food Movement is facing: Can animals be raised humanely if the end goal is not for animals to live a […]
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Dispossessed: Haunted Houses of the Great Recession
In The Paris Review Daily, Colin Dickey searches for a house among foreclosed properties, and finds uncanny forces at work.
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A New York Times Reporter's Discovery About Pakistan and Bin Laden
In trying to prove that the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s whereabouts and protected him, I struggled for more than two years to piece together something other than circumstantial evidence and suppositions from sources with no direct knowledge. Only one man, a former ISI chief and retired general, Ziauddin Butt, told me that he thought […]
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'You Hollywood Idiots!' George R.R. Martin on Collaboration and the Creative Process
I think the look of the show is great. There was a bit of an adjustment for me. I had been living with these characters and this world since 1991, so I had close to twenty years of pictures in my head of what these characters looked like, and the banners and the castles, and […]
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Remembering Is a Social Act
The worry about mental laziness is a really big one; the idea that because we can turn to Wikipedia or turn to our phone and we can get an answer to a question that somehow our brain is becoming slack like an empty wine bladder. In a way, when I started the book [Smarter Than […]
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Conversations with My Deaf Mother
Sometimes I tried to persuade myself that she was not really deaf. She was a mischievous prankster, and what better way to keep everyone hopping than to pretend she was deaf, the way every child has, at one point or another, pretended to be blind, or played dead? For some reason, she had forgotten to […]
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'The Only Things That Mattered Were Booze and Books'
There are times you see the rot you’ve always been. My days were a trail of liquor-store bumblings and sunrise guilt, and every penny I’d earned these years had come to rest in a dirty glass. I’d ceased caring for others, and definitely for myself. The only things that mattered were booze and books. Scrubbing […]
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How a Barista Deals With Bad Customers
Over at The Awl, Molly Osberg examines the service economy and recounts her experience working as a barista at various coffeehouses.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Climate Change and the Language of Mourning
There is the scientific and ideological language for what is happening to the weather, but there are hardly any intimate words. Is that surprising? People in mourning tend to use euphemism; likewise the guilty and ashamed. The most melancholy of all the euphemisms: “The new normal.” “It’s the new normal,” I think, as a beloved […]