Anne Trubek is Associate Professor at Oberlin College. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Mother Jones, The Believer, Dwell, The Chronicle of Higher Education, AGNI, Gourmet.com and elsewhere. Her book, The Sweet Sadness of Writers’ Houses, is forthcoming from The University of Pennsylvania Press.
In January 2006, The New Leader stopped print publication, an early omen to The Christian Science Monitor. But this eighty-five-year old magazine continues to publish bimonthly in the form of…
Helvetica, a 2007 film, looks at the history of this now-ubiquitous font, from its classical modernist roots in 1957 Switzerland to contemporary American billboards. Originally designed to be neutral, fonts…
This blog captures People Reading as an on-going testament to the fact that people still read. They read Focault, Michael Crichton, Emily Dickinson; they read in Spanish and in Russian;…
When Jonny Olsen, from Southern California, first went to Thailand, he stumbled on a plastic toy khaen, the native instrument that sounds like part harmonica, part reedy accordion. Well, the…
McSweeney’s interviews skateboarding pro turned writer, Bret Anthony Johnston, who has written about skateboarding and school for The New York Times. He is now the director of the creative writing…
Azar Nafisi‘s first book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, chronicles an underground book club reading Western Classics under the oppressive Islamic government of Tehran (it subsequently became a favorite book-club book…
In literature there are many figures but few icons. John Updike published over 50 books which dug through the depths of suburban American lives, particularly our sex lives, once comparing…