The last two years have seen a Mister Rogers boom: a documentary, two biographies and a film. But his undergraduate experience has hardly been considered. So I had to ask: what was Fred Rogers like in college?
Comedian Jenny Slate watches a documentary, eats curry, and envisions the end of patriarchy. Then she writes about it.
"I have called my mother because I can't figure out how to be a professional while breastfeeding. Where to pump?"
"The Count of Monte Cristo" is one of the most exciting novels ever written and on the other hand is one of the most badly written novels of all time and in any literature. Umberto Eco reflects on the merits of imperfect works of art, including "Monte Cristo," "Hamlet," and "Casablanca."
Carmen Maria Machado on the alchemy by which a strange, bright, angry young woman becomes an ambitionless, anodyne, doomed character.
Heartbreak fades, but everyday joy — just like everyday strain — fades less.
America had its head broken open during World War II, and out came the visions.
I reached out to various musicians and music scholars to gather some insights about how nonmusicians like myself could select and listen to music more intentionally.
It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly.
That supposedly irresistible thing we call a "baby's first word" is a romanticized milestone, shaped by social and economic circumstances, and it is surprisingly recent.
After calling off her wedding, an aspiring novelist set out on a science expedition to save the Gulf Coast whooping crane. It turns out, every part of every ecosystem is related.
Beware, sweet "Night and Day" reader, of being seduced by the name of Virginia Woolf on the spine of this novel into believing you are about to read a work of high Modernism, a sister to the author's towering "To the Lighthouse" and "Orlando" and "The Waves". Along that path lies only bewilderment.
The transference of what I want to say pours from one container into an incompatible receptacle. Inevitably, something is lost. I am used to being understood sufficiently, rather than fully.
Over the years I've accumulated thousands of other people's photographs. The pictures were orphans, in several senses.
"If Whitman was consuming raw milk from cows that were tuberculosed themselves," she said, "there's a reasonable chance there were very high numbers of mycobacterium bovis in the milk."
Over the course of his career, David Schulson amassed arguably the most impressive private collection of drawings, scribbles, and autographs in the world.
