The real Tom Sawyer was a San Francisco Fireman
Not to mention a Mission Street Saloon owner, civil servant, and hero. The Smithsonian Magazine reports on a real-life Tom Sawyer who was one of Mark Twain’s (Samuel Clemens) drinking…
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Everything that can’t be categorized but is still wonderful!
“This is What the Depression Sounded Like”
Aldo Leopold, ecologist and author of Sand County Almanac took such detailed notes each morning from his back porch that researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison have created his “resurrected soundscape” with digital…
Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
I guess it’s getting to be that time of year again, here are the Royal Observatory’s picks for space photos of the year. The internet was invented so I could…
Two Dollar Radio launches Frequencies
“Scheduled to publish new volumes every Spring and Fall, Frequencies is a journal imprint of Two Dollar Radio that aims to champion artful or creative non-fiction that aggressively asserts the…
“Does the Vagina Have a Consciousness?” No.
Roxane Gay on Vagina: “It is also troubling that so much of womanhood is reduced to the vagina and it’s intersection with virile men. One of the many things feminism…
“The question is no longer should the way artists and educators operate change, but how?”
Full Stop has launched a new series, Teaching in the Margins, to highlight and explore arts education. They will be asking “novelists, poets, educators and academics about their views on…
Notable San Francisco: 9/24-9/29
This Week in San Francisco! Monday 9/24: Celebrate the 20th anniversary of Critical Mass all week with bike, commuter, and social activism focused events all week. Tuesday 9/25: Inside Story…
Weekend Essay Roundup
It’s officially autumn! We welcome you to think about scarves, soup, and playing in giant piles of leaves, but maybe after reading the three great essays we published this weekend…
Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Despite how it may feel a lot of the time, people appear to be getting smarter. This week in alarmism: if you have a poor sense of smell you are…
SATURDAY RUMPUS ESSAY: The Tyranny of “Brooklyn”
Tomorrow is the Brooklyn Book Festival, which means everyone in Brooklyn will gather in auditoria and listen to writers speak.
Peeking Into Spy Tunnels
mental_floss presents brief histories of five spy tunnels. Tunnels were a major spy tool through World War II, but most of these underground projects ended up compromised by double agents, or…