FULL STOP: Today, we’re flooded with stories via the internet — on personal Tumblrs, Facebook and Twitter statuses, the abundance of magazines and newspapers that make their content free online. With so many narratives all around us, why do we still read (and pay for) novels? “Oh I’m fairly certain we… don’t any more. We […]
The Awl
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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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“Brad And Angie Go To Meet The African Pee Generator Girls.” —Sarah Miller, The Awl More from The Awl
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“A Chat with Writer Jon Ronson.” —Elise Czajkowski, The Awl Stories by Ronson on Longreads
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More than 40 years after the “Fatal Vision” murders, Errol Morris’s new book re-investigates a case once covered by the likes of Janet Malcolm and Joe McGinniss: In February 1970, at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a pregnant woman named Colette MacDonald and her two children, Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2, were slaughtered in […]
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Bill Gates and George Soros are handing out billions, but there are downsides to foundation giving: The new focus on metrics has brought with it a new breed of nonprofit and for-profit partnerships. Foundations such as the Omidyar Network, established in 2004 by eBay’s founder, Pierre Omidyar, provide both investments in for-profit companies and charitable […]
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The story of an astrologer who claimed in a 1941 keynote address that the stars indicated Hitler would invade the United States from Brazil and eventually be defeated. The astrologer, Louis de Wohl, was actually an agent for the British government: What no one realized was that de Wohl’s lecture was pure propaganda from the […]
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Helpful tips from a poet who lives in Brooklyn: 1. MOVE OUT OF BROOKLYN I know not every novelist in America lives in Brooklyn, it just seems that way. There are a million stories on the L Train, and they’re all basically about dorky people doing dorky things. Which is fine. The best novel to […]
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A writer visits a fifth grade classroom at a northern California elementary school, where she observes the class’s anti-bullying curriculum: “Stop it, you are bullying me,” he says. Then he lets his body go slack. He bows, then sits down. “You labeled it, you said ‘stop,’ you stood up straight,” Linda says, “Good job.” “Very […]
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The art of writing romance novels: The romance heroine, though possessed of heart, intelligence and beauty, is at the mercy of her own self-criticism most of the time. As the story begins, she is scared and isolated, poor, or abandoned, or lonely. Not infrequently, the book opens with her having just suffered some terrible loss; […]