The other day, a post on Threads stopped me mid-skim. “I am a Japanese woman,” it began. “Here are seven words my language has that English desperately needs.” For a decade now, I have been collecting words from other languages. After years wallowing in English vocabulary like a muddy…
In the end, the only thing to be done with a movie like this is to throw it to the wolves of Reddit.
Some way, somehow, commencement speakers come to embody the ideals and principles of millions of hard-working students who some way, somehow, want their ideals and principles embodied in the choice of commencement speakers across hundreds of institutions of higher education. Basic laws of probability tell us the majority of these choices will not match.
Who knew reading and gardening had such overlap?
The following sentence just begs for snorts of derision, and I can imagine Stanley Tucci’s character rolling his eyes. But The Devil Wears Prada 2 parallels to the Midwestern magazine world. Sure, our versions are inevitably smaller scale and far less sophisticated, less privy to talent, couture, exposure. Budgets and…
A few days ago, a man in Memphis messaged me by LinkedIn to ask if I was the person who had offered to help him market his book. When I said no, he showed me the email that offered to make his novel a smash hit.
Poetry is a different embodiment in words of the experience of being human. AI does not (yet) understand the mysteries, perspectives, uncertainties, and feelings—the experience itself—of inhabiting a body in the physical world.
I found the book in a box in a storage locker just as I was writing a recent piece about a murderer. The amazing thing, the admirable thing, is that William Steig channeled his deep feeling into art over a very long life. The murder stayed in his dreams.
The Cardinals under Hall of Fame manager Whitey Herzog (nicknamed the White Rat) were the daredevils of St. Louis in the 1980s, our biggest disappointments and our greatest heroes. St. Louisans lived and died for the guys who wore the birds on the bat. And this era was named for the style that the Cardinals brought to the game, Whiteyball.
By the time it was gone, the change was subtle but unmistakable: one corner left without its figure, one pedestal left bare. But to understand why that absence matters, it helps to understand who Kate Chopin was and the stories she wrote.