A Meditation upon a Broomstick (1711)
A classic piece of parody from the great Anglo-Irish satirist and author of Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift. The particular butt of Swift's sharp pen in this instance was Robert Boyle…
Tyree Guyton becomes a star in Philadelphia, Heidelberg undergoes renovation in Detroit
Tyree Guyton finishes a major new work in Philadelphia, "The Times," while the Heidelberg Project undertakes its first major renovation as "Heidelberg 3.0" pushes forward. {read}
Interview: Meg Elison on “Big Girl”
““Big Girl” came to me as a reaction to the fact that women are always the wrong size, no matter where they are in life. There is no way to…
The Today show pushed out talented women. It kept Matt Lauer around for years.
While Curry, Hall, and Morales are the most public examples of women who left their Today jobs while Lauer kept his, it is impossible to know if they are the…
A Tech Innovation in Detroit: Connect People, Not Computers
A technology project in Detroit is making in-roads based on an old school philosophy that the Internet can't solve every problem by itself.
The Dangerous Lure of Writing For White Readers in an MFA
So I will end this by asking some questions of the white, American readers toward whom, for better or worse, I have been orienting my writing for so long: What…
The dark side of Detroit’s renaissance
However, the whole argument for pouring taxpayer dollars into this area is that its growth will spill over to the rest of the city, opening up jobs and business opportunities…
What Did 17th Century Food Taste Like?
Guessing the true flavors of these ingredients—the taste of premodern chicken, or mace carried in a ship's hold from Indonesia to Europe, or butter that was churned by hand—is at…
Whatever happened to Winamp? (which you can still download, by the way)
Fifteen to twenty years ago, Winamp was the MP3 player that everyone used. It was the first MP3 player not to suck: playlists, shuffle, convenience. I asked friends on Facebook…
A Digital Archive of 1,800+ Children’s Books from UCLA
“Prior to the mid-eighteenth century,” notes the UCLA Children’s Book Collection—a digital repository of over 1800 children’s books dating from 1728 to 1999—“books were rarely created specifically for children, and…