The Toast
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Oliver Sacks: Scientist, Seer, Sympathizer
Oliver Sacks brought neuroscience closer to popular understanding and in turn, brought people closer to each other. At The Toast, Laura Passin’s thoughtful tribute to Sacks by way of memoir: What he conveys in so many of his great case…
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Tell Don’t Show, Like Wikipedia
Do not make me decipher your intent. Do not assume allegorical common ground. Do not make me pay attention to your god damn motif. Tell don’t show, like Wikipedia. A blunt argument for the straight story in fiction, over at…
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Ijeoma Oluo
Ijeoma Oluo discusses feminism, coloring, badass women, and being a troller of trolls.
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Women’s (Invisible) Work
A sharp appraisal of the myriad forms of unpaid emotional labor that women do in our world by Jess Zimmerman, over at The Toast: Imagine a menu of emotional labor: Acknowledge your thirsty posturing, $50. Pretend to find you fascinating, $100.…
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On Chickens and Children
Nicole Walker writes for The Toast about KFC and pregnancy. We pulled over in the parking lot. I seasoned the gravy, dipped my spork into the potatoes and then dipped the potatoes into the gravy. I forgot all about the…
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That Looks Disgusting
Lilian Min writes for The Toast about the tangled politics of ugly food: I grew up in a household that was comfortable with farts, burps, intense smells, and food that facilitated all of the above. My dad would eat raw…
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The Srs Bsns of Writing Wryly
Sarcasm on the Internet—you know it when you see it. But how? Without the conversational aids of our best deadpan voices or our fingers as scare quotes, we use all sorts of tricks and mechanics. At The Toast, a linguist…
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My Mother Would Be Right
But seeing them beating that man on television, it must have scared me so deep, in a place so hidden, that I didn’t even know about it. My brain kept playing as though I were a regular teenager. But my…
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Poetry for the Shopping Mall
Ah, happy food court! Peaceful kingdom! Is it possible that all these tables now are empty Where once families did jostle for a feasting place? Over at The Toast, a lovely and timely poem, “Ode to an Abandoned Shopping Mall,”…
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Black History Romance
Alyssa Cole invited Kianna Alexander, Piper Huguley, and Lena Hart to join her for a roundtable discussion of historical romance novels by black authors. They talk about inspiration, research, and character development over at the Toast.
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This Week in Short Fiction
Leave it to The Toast to give us a story told by a mermaid as opposed to a story about one. And leave it to The Toast to find a very good mermaid storyteller indeed. On Wednesday, they released “Mermaids at…
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Beyond Joy Luck
At The Toast, Nicole Soojung Callahan, Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, Karrisa Chen, and others weigh in on the state of Asian-American literature: I grew up in L.A. and Long Beach. White people were always the minority in my schools and neighborhoods,…