Q&A: Jews Behaving Badly

In the July 18, 1988, issue of The New Yorker, Adam Schwartz published “The Grammar of Love,” a short story based on his teaching experiences in Chicago. He followed with the publication of “This Bed” in the June 22, 1992, issue, and earlier this year, both stories were incorporated into the novel “A Stranger on […]

Texas Ranger

“I can’t imagine a music-related event on earth that requires more advance planning and preparation than South by Southwest in Austin, Texas,” writes NPR Music’s Stephen Thompson, outlining the wide-ranging schedule of the new-music festival—running through Saturday—which features some two thousand acts appearing on more than eighty stages. In an effort to sort out the […]

Women’s Work

After Ann Friedman, a contributing editor and columnist at The American Prospect, saw Vida’s statistics on women in publishing last month, she launched Lady Journos, “a one-stop shop for lazy editors who claim there aren’t many women journalists,” as she wrote on her personal site. Lady Journos highlights the work of lesser-known women from publications […]

Townie Kid

I grew up not far from Oberlin College. In high school, my friends and I would drive the 20 minutes south on Rt. 58 and hang out at the campus coffee bars. I didn’t drink coffee at the time and wouldn’t for years, not in college or when I started working, though I embraced every […]

Story Time

On Monday, Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum—the duo behind the new-media short-story venture Electric Lit—launched the public beta site of Broadcastr, a location-based storytelling project that allows users to record, index, listen to, and share stories about the places that inspired them, online or on a mobile device. So far, Hunter says, Broadcastr has partnerships […]

Bunnies and Bullets

When I was five years old, my parents left my brothers and me with a babysitter and went to a church auction. They returned–fantastically, inexplicably, unprecedentedly–with a secondhand ColecoVision and a box of games, and I hopped from foot to foot as my dad delicately connected the console’s wires to the back of the TV […]

Great Ape

For most of my adult life, I’ve been afraid of apes, the result of an effective—too effective—intro-level anthropology class that outlined the ways in which humans and primates are just a few DNA twists away from being identical. Kate, in her post last week, asked, “Who wants to hate a chimp?” Me. I did. Chimps […]