In the aftermath of disaster, as new communities thousands-strong coalesce in the countryside around Port-au-Prince, Haitians ask: what makes a city?
Virginia Quarterly Review
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Can an Old Satire, Reborn, Survive the New Political Climate?
Meghan Daum is nervous about the reception for her reissued debut novel, a satire of small towns and coastal elites.
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Quality of Life Report, 2017
A personal essay by author Meghan Daum in which she describes her trepidation around the re-issue of her 2003 debut novel, The Quality of Life Report. The book–about a New York television reporter who moves to the midwest–pokes fun at liberals, coastal elites and P.C. culture, and makes jokes about gender, race and class, all […]
Posted inArts & Culture, Nonfiction, Quotes, Science & Nature
The Telescope That Sees into the Heart of Hawaii
Trevor Quirk reports on how native Hawaiians protested the construction of a telescope on spiritual grounds — the presence of which cuts to the very question of who gets to decide what happens on Hawaiian soil — and who the soil belongs to.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Practical Cartography: I Am Mapped, Therefore I Am
Lois Parshley’s wide-ranging, fascinating story on mapping the unmapped — from black holes, to the bottom of the sea, to the populations of the Congo and Haiti — looks at not just the science of map-making, but the morality.
Posted inEditor's Pick
Here Be Dragons: Finding the Blank Spaces in a Well-Mapped World
Maps are how we orient ourselves, and how we donate a place’s value — and by extension, the value of that place’s inhabitance. What does that means for the place still left un-mapped?
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Twisting History to Tell Universal Truths
Readers often wonder how much of an author’s real life ends up in their novels. In 2013 in the Virginia Quarterly Review, novelist Nina Revoyr described how she combined elements of her life with the real lives of silent-film era actors Sessue Hayakawa and Mary Miles Minter in her book The Age of Dreaming. Revoyr […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
What Separated Los Angeles from Its River?
In the early twentieth century, a booming Los Angeles was separated from the river in three decisive steps. First, an aqueduct was built more than 200 miles north to water to the city from the Sierra Nevada—a move mythologized in the movie Chinatown. Then, the city took control of all water rights on the river. Finally, the […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Eating During the San Francisco Tech Boom
They have astonishingly well-paid jobs that they don’t like. Some plan to stay only until their options are vested. Then they will move on to their “actual” careers. This population of the possessed waiting to be dispossessed spends an inordinate amount of time comparing the gourmet kitchens of different website headquarters. The top digital companies […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Author Porochista Khakpour on New Age Treatments for Lyme Disease, and ‘Mind Over Matter’
As someone who’s twice been diagnosed with Lyme Disease, I’ve read an awful lot about it. The more I read, the more confused I am; for every long, boring article about antibiotic treatments, there are two or three about widely varying alternative cures. The Last Illusion author Porochista Khakpour has been living with Lyme for […]