The morning before grandpa’s funeral my family agreed to refrain from sorting through and divvying up his worldly possessions until the following weekend, but by evening we were all drinking and exploring the nooks and crannies of his house with much sentiment and nostalgia, which—perhaps predictably—devolved into a collective pawing and claiming of pretty much […]
“We’re already bored with what hasn’t happened yet,” declares a stanza in poet Vincent Toro’s latest collection Hivestruck. Throughout the book, Toro grapples with a central imperative of the techno-politics of our age: that the digital tools and realms we frequent have changed us as individuals and a society in ways that are evolving so […]
With Thucydides’ minutely detailed account of the Peloponnesian War — the war fought between 430-405 BC, the book written throughout, resulting in a dauntingly dense tome that in modern pages approaches a monstrous 700 — he essentially created the field of history as we know it. It’s been some 2,400 years since this consequential conflict […]
When Karl Marlantes was a student at Yale during the early days of the Vietnam War—in which he would enlist and receive the Navy Cross, rendering the experience later in his acclaimed novel Matterhorn—he first became aware of his own naivete after his dormmates laughed at his assertion that the American president would never lie. […]
Over the past year we’ve seen the worst onslaught of media collapse since 2008, with partial or total layoffs at the Los Angeles Times, Sports Illustrated, Popular Science, Forbes, the Intercept, Vice, Vox, Pitchfork, the Messenger, Buzzfeed, Bustle, and the list goes on and on. The reasons are many — dwindling readership, general economic uncertainty, […]