How Not to Break
For NYT Magazine, Wils S. Hylton tackles the myth of Laura Hillenbrand, the bestselling nonfiction author who never really leaves her house:She is cut off not only from basic tools of reporting, like...
View ArticleWave Logs
Adam Rogers takes a JoCo cruise for Wired, where he combats 800 sea monkeys, rabid claustrophobia, hot tub office-hours, and a re-working of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” to the tune of “Battlestar...
View ArticleStrange Brews
As the associate art director at Knopf, Chip Kidd’s the man when it comes to book covers. Over at the New Yorker, Ronald Kelts looks at Kidd’s latest project, Haruki Murakami’s The Strange Library:Kidd...
View ArticleA Solitary Figure
For The Independent, Cahal Milmo pens a profile on Marsha Mehran, bestselling author, noted beauty, and adamant recluse. Spending her time between exile and literature, Mehran championed her...
View ArticleThe New Silence
Michael J. Gaynor visits Green Bank, the West Virginian town without wi-fi:In Green Bank, you can’t make a call on your cell phone, and you can’t text on it, either. Wireless internet is outlawed, as...
View ArticleRain Dance
Over at The Awl, Josephine Livingstone treats us to poetics on the colorful sounds of precipitation:Actual rain falling on my urban windows was, however, just too good to miss. I have lived on three...
View ArticleOne Man Choir
In the wake of D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, Dan Piepenbring waxes poetic on R&B groups, the state of the genre, and how, when it comes down to it, the swinging feel of a swinging chorus is all but...
View ArticleVoodoo Chile
A decade ago, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah stopped by Electric Lady Studios; ten years later, she’s writing about it for The Believer:Maybe that’s why it’s difficult not to feel sentimental, blessed even,...
View ArticleMasked Calling
Over at Vice, Eric Nusbaum chronicles the life of Padre Fray Tormenta, Texcoco’s resident addict turned priest turned interim luchador enmascarado:In theory, a priest wearing a lucha libre mask sounds...
View ArticleCalling Freddy
Michael Chabon has a short story over on Tablet; in it, he negotiates the acquaintance of a boy and his crippled neighbor:There was no menace or queerness in his manner, none at all. Mischief, yes. And...
View ArticleNot So Brief and Completely Wondrous
Over at Gawker, Jason Parham leads us to an extremely long and incredibly detailed interview with Junot Diaz:“When as a young person you lose all your bearings, all your reference points, when the gap...
View ArticleThe Wind Cries Mary
Last week we highlighted Rachel Kaadzhi Ghansah’s piece, “A River Runs Through It,” over at The Believer. Now, she shares a playlist of tunes, recorded at Electric Lady Studios, to accompany the...
View ArticleTemporary Residence
At NYT Magazine, Maggie Jones profiles an entire generation: the South Korean adoptees making the trek back “home.” But having spent their lives abroad, where “home” is becomes a tough question to...
View ArticleWhat’s in a Name
Over at Matter, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gives us a new piece of short fiction:My father’s first child was a girl. He said she was a loud squalling baby who grasped his finger with surprising strength,...
View ArticleThere and Back Again
The Guardian profiles Alex Malarkey, co-author of the bestseller The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven. After admitting that, among other things, he’s never actually been there, his publisher looks to...
View ArticleKinky Reggae
Kima Jones chats with Marlon James over at Midnight Breakfast; the two touch on ghost stories, Bob Marley’s reverberations, and the danger in assuming a story’s authenticity:Some of the things that...
View ArticleWhere No Man’s Gone Before
Photographer Lynsey Addario is profiled by the Columbia Journalism Review; the piece highlights her work as a voice for Pakistani refugees, US marines, and Syrian war casualties—all while balancing her...
View ArticleReasonable Cause
The Torres family learned how Christopher died from watching the news the next day. At a press conference, the department’s chief public-safety officer said that two officers had tried to arrest...
View ArticleDumb Luck
Fred Vinturini explains over at Medium how he happenstanced into becoming an author:She finally turns to me and asks me what’s the secret to getting published. How did I get my seat at the front of the...
View ArticleReal Life Sci-Fi?
Over at The Toast, Mallory Ortberg gives us a compendium of signs that you’re stuck in a soft sci-fi novel. Among the more notable signifiers:You live in a world where robots masturbate, for some...
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