Author Jonathan Eig, winner of the 2018 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing for his book Ali: A Life, with Gerald Early, Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the Department of English at Washington University in St. Louis, and also editor of The Common Reader.
These two were meant…
Olivia Octavius
How smart could an octopus really be? I mean, sure, all those suction cups would be handy. But otherwise, they just hang out by themselves waving all those arms around …
It was the pranks that changed my mind.
More than one octopus has learned to turn off…
Beatrix Potter as a child.
“You like Beatrix Potter?” my friend Jodi, a retired English teacher, asks casually.
“Love her. Flopsy, Mopsy—and Squirrel Nutkin was my favorite. Those gentle little books are so great for kids. So peaceful. Did you know they named an asteroid after Bea—”
“She boiled bunnies,”…
I ask writer and scholar Olivia Rutigliano, who often writes about fiction for CrimeReads, what current trends reveal. Well, she replies, “as with Knives Out, many new mystery works seem to be responding very directly to the oppressions fostered by the Trump administration, and themes of misogyny and sexism that we're observing in our current #MeToo era.”
(Credit: Katherine Chase on Unsplash.jpg)
The alarm shrills at seven o’clock. That means I had seven hours of sleep—was that right, or was it supposed to be eight? Eight glasses of water is no longer a magic number, I read; for some, it might even be too much. Shrugging off…
(Credit: Divily from Pixabay.jpg)
Years ago, I went on a date with a short, dark, and handsome architect who had the colossal arrogance of anyone who thinks he can decide what sort of giant building the rest of us have to look at for the next five decades. He wanted…
(Image by Gordon Johnson via Pixabay)
After years of doggedly alternating “he” and “she” or choosing mischievously contrarian pronouns (“If a welder joins the union, she can expect …”), the struggle is over. Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year and the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Decade are one and…
Credit: skyseeker via Flickr
Our first night living miles away from downtown’s bright lights, I went outside, looked up, and felt a deep contentment wrap around me. I was used to a night sky that looked like a black shoebox with a few holes punched. This looked like diamonds sewn…
Credit: 70023venus2009 via Flickr
“You don’t know what the AOS is?” The shock in Shawn’s voice borders on pity.
“We’ll take you,” promises Susan. They dive into a conversation about the latest hot item, a rug of magical price and quality. The lucky folks who snagged one started photographing their…
A border Mass near El Paso. (Credit: Abby Grunzinger)
The wallets were what got me. They fool you, because they seem so practical, just neat, safe folders of money. Yet they also hold us, flattened into paper: our name, our age, where we live, who we love. Their edges soften…
Camp is brilliant at introducing irony where it once did not exist, but now irony exists everywhere; its distance and layering are our habitual mode of perception, absent only in cults and Waldorf preschools. What role is left for camp to play?
“Botanica Absentia” by Margaret Keller (Credit: Courtesy of Margaret Keller)
The room is a velvety, lightless black, except at the center, where light refracts through dichroic glass pendants and makes rainbows on the holographic floor. They are meant to cheer us up.
This is Margaret Keller’s Botanica Absentia installation at…