Other
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Sympathy for the Library-Fine Dodger
You can’t always get what you want…and if what Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones wants is forgiveness for decades-old library fines, then he’s out of luck.
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From Alcoholic to Diet Cokehead
In an interview with addiction website The Fix, reprinted at Salon, memoirist and poet Mary Karr discusses getting clean, flouting rules, and how sobriety shaped her relationship with David Foster Wallace. You’re present when you’re not drinking a fifth of Jack…
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Send A Letter Commemorating Irish Letters
What a cool way to celebrate Ireland’s storytelling tradition: a new Irish stamp features the text of an entire short-short by 17-year-old Dubliner Eoin Moore. Moore’s piece, about how “[t]he city embodies the people, and the people embody the city,”…
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A Brief History of Swans
We frighten away boyfriends, lovers, strangers, and we do not mind, because we are together: together, we are glorious.
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Self-published micro-fictions by Matthew Sharpe
On Monday, the novelist Matthew Sharpe announced that once a week for the next twelve weeks he will write a very short story to post on his blogspot as an experiment in self-publishing. Uncommonly simple in execution, his blog is…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
If you are dreaming a lot about animals, you might get Alzheimers (and other signs). Maybe aliens are just energy conscious. Maybe a lot of things. So it’s settled then: Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids…
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Only the Lonely (Have Serious Health Problems)
Loneliness is more than just a feeling, according to an article in the New Republic. It’s a biological process that activates your physical pain responses and trashes your immune system. Here’s one of many fascinating (and, okay, probably depressing) examples of…
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Soyinka Clears the Record on Achebe
“Achebe A Celebrated Storyteller, But No Father Of African Literature, Says Soyinka.” The headline sound sensationalistic and snipey, but this interview with Wole Soyinka about the death of Chinua Achebe is nuanced and comprehensive, if more than a little prickly. Soyinka…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Why are barns painted red? Because of dying stars. Very important news: yesterday the world’s biggest crocodile turned 110 (maybe). On the other side of feelings about the world, welcome to the age of beard billboards. Soviet board games of…
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The Ecosystem Inside You
There’s lots of cool/gross stuff in this Michael Pollan article about the microbes in human bodies: “for every human cell that is intrinsic to our body, there are about 10 resident microbes,” mother’s milk feeds newborns’ “gut bugs,” and there…
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“What was his name? Mark Carson!”
At BuzzFeed, images of New York’s Rally Against Hate. The rally came in response to recent anti-gay hate crimes, including the murder of Mark Carson, who was shot in the West Village on May 18.
