IT IS, in fact, possible to have a decent time on Goodreads. You just have to ignore everything about the way the site is designed and how you’re supposed to use it. When I first signed up in early 2012...
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If there’s one thing authors love more than procrastinating, it’s praising one another. During the Renaissance, Thomas More’s Utopia got a proto-blurb from Erasmus (“divine wit”), while Shakespeare’s First Folio got one from Ben Jonson (“The wonder of our stage!”).
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Those aren’t just lyrics from the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” They’re also the questions that the brain must constantly answer while processing streams of visual signals from the eyes and purely mental pictures bubbling out of the imagination.
Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide.
In 1967, the physicist John Wheeler was giving a lecture about a mysterious and startling phenomenon in deep space that the field was just beginning to understand.
ALTHOUGH I am never awake for them, I prefer sunrises to sunsets. Sunsets are an ending, and I love beginnings. Sunsets mean the end of another day, which means time away from all the things I love to do, at least until the next morning. I guess it’s a FOMO of sorts, a constant fear of missing out when my eyes are closed.
Since the pandemic upended the world, we’ve been getting plenty of mixed signals about cities. We’ve heard both that cities like New York are over and that they’re immensely popular. Are they bastions of disease that people will forever avoid?
Anthony Bourdain once said, “Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”
In 1989 and ’90, the culture had not yet figured out what it wanted to be. What we got was the Diet Slice Era—refreshing, indistinct, and a harbinger of what was to come.
I was probably in college when I first learned that movies could commandeer my desires in a manner hostile to my flourishing as a woman. My favorite film at the time was “Sin City,” a 2005 neo-noir adapted from Frank Miller’s graphic-novel series of the same name.
What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing
As soon as I sit down to write, I feel compelled to scrub my bathtub and reorganize my filing cabinet — the most tedious chores suddenly become more appealing than the task at hand. Writing can feel so daunting that we’ve invented the term writer’s block to describe the unique sensation of its challenge, and we debate whether the ability to write well is learned or simply innate.
An amber-colored glass paperweight sits in my nightstand drawer. It used to belong to my dad, who recently died, and to his grandmother before him. It’s shaped like a cube, with delicate flowers painted on each side, and it’s heavy in my palm. But I rarely pick it up, because I have no papers that need weighing down. The object occupies valuable space that might otherwise be used for a book, tissues, or anything else that I actually use. Still, I keep it, along with a few other pieces of what you might call “sentimental clutter”—personally meaningful yet impractical objects: a box of old birthday cards, a chipped seashell, a loyalty card for a café that no longer exists.
For the first thirty years of my life, I lived within a one-mile radius of Willesden Green Tube Station. It’s true I went to college—I even moved to East London for a bit—but such interludes were brief. I soon returned to my little corner of North West London. Then suddenly, quite abruptly, I left not just the city but England itself.
There’s plenty to consider about Barbie, but let’s start with her feet. Perfectly arched, but not quite demi-pointe—the ideal position to fit into any pump. They’re instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever played with the iconic doll. So when the trailer for the upcoming live-action Barbie movie opened with a shot of star Margot Robbie stepping out of Barbie’s marabou stilettos, still on tiptoes, the internet exploded.
THE HEATWAVE has subsided, and now, instead of hot sticky air seeping through the walls, cool breezes are making gauzy white curtains flutter in every room and it's a little easier to breath at noon, when the sun is at its highest. It's also much easier to workout out now...
