Columns
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Steinitz’s Sense of Smell
If you can’t describe the color red to someone born blind, here are some scents you can’t describe to someone born anosmic, or without a sense of smell: “feet, chalk, lilacs, gardenias, sour milk, rain, new cars, Chanel No. 5,…
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Elif Batuman Makes “Allopatric Speciation” Interesting
You’d think an essay about Franco Moretti, morphology, and the diminution of classic novels to “five tiny dots in the graph of Figure 2” would be academic and sawdust-dry. Not in the hands of Elif Batuman, who brings her wry…
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College of One by Sheilah Graham
The Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, born Lily Shiel, shaped herself out of nothing much, and she knew it. As her eight memoirs attest, she also knew how remarkable the story of her self-reinvention was—especially the three and a half…
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Bill Murray: Actor, Comedian, and…Poetry Reader?
Open Culture has not one, not two, but three separate videos of Bill Murray performing at a poetry reading. The poems he’s chosen are “Forgetfulness” by Billy Collins, “What We Miss” by Sarah Manguso, and “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” by…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Dan Weiss is on tour with his band for the next three plus weeks, but fear not: We’ll still be serving up your morning coffee. Need a little more maudlin in your life? On the M thing, how about a Morse…
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Spotlight: Dylan Glynn
Dylan Glynn meanders between the bright and the spooky in his Who Are You series.
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E-Reader App Roundup
Sure you love old-fashioned books, but sometimes they’re too bulky to carry on the bus, or you don’t want to devote valuable bookshelf real estate to something you’re not sure you’ll like. For those times, there are e-readers—or, when your…
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When Banning a Book Is Good
Novelist Dennis Miller was participating in a panel discussion about censorship at Mansfield University’s campus library, when he joked that his book should be banned: “It has sex, violence, and adult language.” Library director Scott DiMarco’s response? Done and done.…
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W. Kamau Bell and Nato Green Tonight in the Mission
Rumpus pal W. Kamau Bell got all fancy and moved to New York to host his hilarious TV show Totally Biased. But we haven’t forgotten his San Francisco roots, and neither has he—he’ll be performing tonight at The Chapel on Valencia…
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Dispatch from the Carnival #1: The Trick is There is No Trick
We start by lighting parts of ourselves on fire that are easier to put out than our faces. Hands, to begin.
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Ted Wilson Reviews the World #191
THE NRA ★★★★★ (2 out of 5) Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing the NRA.
