“Elsevier says it is investigating how one of its journals managed to publish a paper with patently absurd assertions about the genetic inheritance of personality traits,” I read in the newsletter of Retraction Watch, a brilliant ten-year-old project undertaken by two scientists. Regularly appalled by what passes for research, they…
A woman slips on her boyfriend’s cotton shirt, its shoulders dropping inches below hers, and rolls up the long, long sleeves. She looks even more feminine. A man borrows his girlfriend’s soft blue pashmina, swinging one end over his broad shoulder. He looks far less masculine. I am using traditional…
Any day now, I will slip on something I loved and find it no longer fits or even suits me, after this feral reprieve and all the stress cookies. Yet I miss what those clothes used to mean, the idea of them, the feel. The missing is not vanity; I am hardly a clotheshorse.
Susan Berfield’s book reads like a novel and she proves the adage that truth can be just as engaging as fiction. This is no small feat given that there are extensive discussions of century-old legislation and litigation, which only a true antitrust nerd can love.
A pandemic and a war, a pandemic and a civil-rights revolution … Only the shapes of crisis change. Human nature does not.
A whole lot of us are grieving—and as a result, feeling even more vulnerable, because sadness, in this culture, reads as weakness. And weakness scares us, because it means we are defenseless and powerless.
Clotheslines are at once homespun and ethereal, whether they are strung across apartment buildings in Brooklyn or overlook a field of sunflowers in the Midwest.
Be it Hughes and Hurston, Baldwin and Wright, or Tupac and Biggie, burdened friendships are a recurrent and disturbingly alluring theme in the study of Black writers. Yet, if it is the dramatic bite of high-profile betrayal that tends to ignite a hot-selling story, in the case of Zora and Langston it is the dynamics of friendship that provide a happy counterexample.
In 1895, Samuel Verner, a white man from South Carolina, moved to the Belgian Congo to work as a Presbyterian missionary. It seems he had a greater aptitude for acquiring human beings than saving souls. In 1904, he received a commission to bring a dozen people from the Congo to St. Louis to be exhibited at the World’s Fair.
Is this the usual pre-election jitters, when we all threaten Canada? Or is it the blend of clear-eyed realism, hope, and fantasy that brought settlers here in the first place? This country, for so long the world’s golden child, has tarnished.