Strange Words for a Strange Time
The curators of News on the Web did us a painful favor when they collected the new words of the past decade.
By Jeannette Cooperman
How Grief’s Alchemy Turned “Hamnet” into “Hamlet”
O’Farrell avoids naming Shakespeare in her novel, calling him “the tutor” when Agnes (Anne Hathaway to us) falls in love with him. This lets us avoid all the pompous scholarly baggage and know him as a young man driven by his love of language and theater, his gifts of wit and knowledge.
Is Beauty a Grace or a Curse?
Most days, beauty opens doors—it makes people assume success and virtue and want to offer favors and opportunities. It attracts. But even that has an endpoint: Studies show that beautiful women hit a glass ceiling even faster.
He Turned Birds into Pantone Colors
Ridgway devoted his life to creatures that soared and glided, trotting after them through mud and storms, ever vigilant, and detailing and comparing and never giving up. No one has described as many North American bird species, let alone illustrated them himself.
Why Superman Used a Phone Booth
The booth represents a refusal to fling away old technology—and the memories it triggered. Curious whether the phone booth ever made the local news, I check the Republic-Times archives and learn that this phone booth is new.
Money Is a Popularity Contest
Digital originals and currencies could give us a world that is more flexible, uncensored, and democratic. But they will also give us a world in which the very currency by which we live changes value by the minute and nothing can stop it from collapsing.
Eating Our Terror
What if, the next time I feel consumed, swallowed up, I reframe what is happening? What if I make myself the subject instead of the object and thereby own the verb? I have eaten something bad for me—or maybe even good for me, like medicine, but bitter.
My Old Kentucky Quandary
America’s oldest sport carries trappings of America’s oldest problems. So does my life, with its ambivalence toward wealth, hating its injustice and excess but craving its—what? Elegance?
Do We Even Want Real Journalism?
Generalizing from survey results, the majority of U.S. citizens are uneasy with the values that form journalism’s core. And no, this is not the alt-right booing section—the responses cut across all ideological leanings.
Small Talk, Big Ideas
I like big talk. Sweeping discussions of why we are on this planet and what we should do to fix it. I want people to explain bits of the world to me or, better yet, pull back the curtain so I can peer inside their soul.
The Genes That Make Us Human—and How We Thwart Them
A new study is the first to identify 267 genes that distinguish modern humans from chimpanzees and Neanderthals. Nearly all those 267 genes helped shape the behaviors that distinguish us: creativity, self-awareness, cooperativeness, and the ability to do what doctors always nag us to do, take active steps to make sure we lead a long and healthy life.
Speak of the Dead in Present Tense
In the scale of my tiny life, my mother is as timeless as Shakespeare, her insights just as relevant. I fight to remember the past tense, and then I think, Why?