Best Laid Plans: Norman Bel Geddes’s Unrealized Projects
“Every new thing is resisted.” —Thomas Edison, 1914 “Think different.” —Apple ad slogan, 1997–2002 “The fairy tales of the past, told to while away an idle hour with mysterious impossibilities,… Read more »
The Ugly Swans: When life imitates art
In Russia, June 12th is celebrated as Russia Day, an annual commemoration of the nation’s withdrawal from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It’s usually a day of celebration. Instead, this year, thousands of… Read more »
In honor of Bloomsday: (Some of) the best of What Would Leopold Bloom Do?
Happy Bloomsday, everyone! Today marks the 113th anniversary of Mr. Leopold Bloom eating with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls, and to celebrate, we thought we’d take a look back at… Read more »
Bob Dylan’s Nobel Lecture is better than we deserve
By now you’re presumably aware of the Swedish Academy’s brilliant decision last October to award noted non-potato-chip Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature. To paraphrase a great thinker: Yes, y’all. Yes. After the dizzying… Read more »
The chef and the cactus: Why I wrote Campus Confidential
As my book Campus Confidential: How College Works, or Doesn’t, for Professors, Parents, and Students is published today, I feel compelled to discuss some of the influences that drove me to… Read more »
Linda Sarsour “will not submit to fear”
In February we reported on the efforts of Linda Sarsour—“working woman, racial justice and civil rights activist, every Islamophobe’s worst nightmare, and mother of three”—to raise money for the Jewish… Read more »
National Willa Cather Center to open in Nebraska
Willa Cather, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of books including Alexander’s Bridge, O Pioneers!, and My Antonia, has been voted “most-notable Nebraskan” by the state’s Lincoln Journal Star newspaper. Sixty-two years after it first opened in the… Read more »
One Class-y Playlist
We asked the highly excellent Italian author Francesco Pacifico—whose subversive, expansive, exhilarating novel Class we’re publishing today—for some music recs. And oh, how he obliged. When I set out to write Class, a… Read more »
Slavoj Žižek owes us an anti-Trump book, and this is why
I know that at this point in history most of us would rather binge-watch Ted Cruz’s infamous twenty-one-hour riff on Green Eggs and Ham, Duck Dynasty, the WWF, and great hamburgers… Read more »
When Francis Met Donald (or, Habemus problem)
Melville House author Pope Francis has been throwing shade at Donald Trump for a while now. You may remember that before the election, Francis said in a speech that “fear—as… Read more »