The weisswurst frühstück Obama was enjoying is a beery Bavarian stalwart: boiled sausages with mustard, freshly baked pretzels and a cold weissbier, the operative word here being cold. Alcohol in the morning must be fresh and zippy. A bit of fizz, something dry, a hint of sweetness, a sharp kick – as drinks writer Henry Jeffreys puts […]
The Guardian
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Celebrating and Surviving in North Korea
Interviews with defectors also suggest that North Koreans are not serious consumers of marijuana. The drug of choice is, in fact, something much more pernicious: crystal meth. Meth, known colloquially as eoreum or bingdu (both mean “ice”, a name by which the drug is also known in the US) is a drug unfortunately suited to […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List, Top 5
The Top 5 Longreads of the Week
Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * *
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Brussels Playbook: Meet the Mike Allen of Europe
A 35-year-old Australian, [Ryan] Heath rises every morning at 4.30 to finish off the day’s Brussels Playbook, which in only a month and a half already goes out to almost 40,000 people. (The site itself received, in May, about 1.7m page views, from just over 700,000 unique visitors. The original Politico receives 7m monthly uniques, though […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium Helped Launch Led Zeppelin
Whether by accident or design, [the Fillmore Auditorium’s Bill Graham] has succeeded in launching most of the international pop groups whose claim to fame is musical rather than fashionable. Cream, Jimi Hendrix and the Who all owe a great deal to his fanatical championship. And at the beginning of January, he promoted a new group […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Yes Means Yes, So What’s the Catch? A Reading List About Consent
I subscribe to writer Ann Friedman’s fabulous newsletter, where she recently shared a link to an article she wrote for Cosmopolitan magazine. Friedman visited the University of California at Santa Barbara and interviewed twenty-something students about their sexual habits and desires—specifically if they’d been affected by the “Yes Means Yes” law, SB 967, which demands enthusiastic consent from all parties throughout a sexual encounter.
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Yes Means Yes, So What’s the Catch? A Reading List About Consent
I subscribe to writer Ann Friedman’s fabulous newsletter, where she recently shared a link to an article she wrote for Cosmopolitan magazine. Friedman visited the University of California at Santa Barbara and interviewed twenty-something students about their sexual habits and desires—specifically if they’d been affected by the “Yes Means Yes” law, SB 967, which demands enthusiastic consent from all parties throughout a sexual encounter.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
How ‘Body Worlds’ Inspired People to Leave Their Bodies to Science
Von Hagens has no shortage of donors. His exhibitions have used 1,100 bodies – but he claims to have another 12,100 living donors signed up. One is Emma Knott, a PR consultant in London. “I was so inspired after I saw the exhibition], which is why I made that decision,” she says. But does she have reservations? “Not really, I mean let’s face it I’m going to be dead.” For her, the attraction lies in encouraging people to get excited about science and anatomy.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Paradise Lost: ‘I Did Not Die. I Did Not Go to Heaven’
Alex Malarkey was paralyzed from the neck down in a car accident when he was six years old. The young boy claimed to have visited heaven, seen his stillborn sister and talked with Jesus. Years later, he began to recant the story touted in his bestselling book, but no one would listen–until now. Michelle Dean reports at The Guardian.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
‘The Most Difficult Essay I’ve Ever Written’: Meghan Daum on Her Mother
“If you asked me what my central grievance with my mother was, I would tell you that I had a hard time not seeing her as a fraud.”