How to Go to the Zoo By Matt Kirkland You don’t love the zoo. But you should. Here’s how. Connecting Refugees -One Bead at a Time By Rebecca Tirrell Talbot Refugee Beads and Village Gatherings help establish connections and make lasting changes in the life of refugees – and Americans. The High Line -Manhattan’s Newest [...]
From Smithsonian Magazine: 35 Who Made a Difference: Wendell Berry. As a farmer, he has shunned the use of tractors and plowed his land with a team of horses. As a poet, he has stood apart from the categories and controversies of the literary world, writing in language neither modern nor postmodern, making poems that [...]
From The Believer: Dancing About Architecture. I just published a novel about music. Early in the process of writing it, I was warned by a similarly music-obsessive friend that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” Since that first somewhat menacing reminder, I’ve heard the line frequently. At first blush, the claim is a [...]
From the New York Review of Books: Manhood for Amateurs. Most great stories of adventure, from The Hobbit to Seven Pillars of Wisdom, come furnished with a map. That’s because every story of adventure is in part the story of a landscape, of the interrelationship between human beings (or Hobbits, as the case may be) [...]
From the Times Magazine: Home Sweet (Urban) Homestead. In Oakland, where backyard menageries and D.I.Y. charcuterie are the new garage band, the term “urban homesteading” doesn’t need an explanation. “It fits into the Oakland sort of self-defined vibe or aesthetic of doing things from scratch and being kind of hard-core,” she said, tugging at the [...]
Sigur Rós Redeems the Music Video By Jenni Simmons In “Glósóli,” Icelandic band Sigur Rós creatively fuses music and cinema, renewing the lost art of the well-made music video. A Human Revolution By Josh Cacopardo The Human Revolution promotes hope, love, and responsibility to your neighbors and your planet, all to a danceable groove – [...]
From the Well blog: Can You Get Fit in Six Minutes a Week? The potency of interval training is nothing new. Many athletes have been straining through interval sessions once or twice a week along with their regular workout for years. But what researchers have been looking at recently is whether humans, like that second [...]
From the New York Times Magazine: The Overextended Family. Now, I like my parents. A lot. I really do. That’s why I make the 1,500-mile trip to visit them three or four times a year. I did not, however, spend the bulk of my adult life perfecting the fine art of establishing boundaries only to [...]
From City Journal: Beauty and Desecration. At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive those tributes. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality-however achieved and at whatever moral cost-that won the prizes. Indeed, there arose a widespread suspicion of beauty as [...]
From the Washington Post: Le Sandwich Takes a Bite Out of French Tradition. The shifting lunchtime habits, which are more pronounced in large cities such as Paris, are part of a social tug of war in France between the imperatives of a modern industrial economy and a long-cherished tradition of fine food produced and prepared [...]