Tea with beetles, chess and lemonade with butterflies, laundry day with a praying mantis–it’s the stuff of children’s books and the dioramas of San Francisco artist Lisa Wood, now on display at The Gold Bug in Pasadena, CA.
This Bug’s Life
All the Sad Young Literary Women
Are New York Times book reviewers biased toward writers who are “white and male and live in Brooklyn”? Chris Jackson at The Atlantic laments all the sad young literary women.
The Return of Agatha Christie
“As much as there is an evergreen fascination for Christie’s stories, there’s also an alluring air of mystery surrounding the woman herself.” Broadly explores the enduring nature of Agatha Christie‘s stories, the recent surge in adaptations (including Murder on the Orient Express), and the mysterious 11-day disappearance of the writer herself. From our archives: an essay on the sometimes inherent predictability of the mystery genre.
Jack Ryan is Real
Jack Ryan really exists and even teaches at the U.S. Naval Academy. Vulture’s Dan Solomon met the real Jack Ryan and discussed what it’s like to have the same name as Tom Clancy’s hero. No, he has never used the connection as a pick-up line. Pair with: Our in memoriam of Clancy.
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A Mother’s Love
One Romanian woman may have committed “a barbarian crime against humanity” by incinerating a collection of seven famous paintings – including Picasso’s “Harlequin Head,” Monet’s “Waterloo Bridge, London,” and Gauguin’s “Girl in Front of Open Window.” Her excuse? It was in order to protect her son – a skilled art thief – from prosecution.
A Unified Theory of Doughnuts
For LitHub, Elizabeth McCracken proposes, at last, a unified theory of doughnuts: “Perhaps I cling to doughnuts because doughnuts still exist in the world, though Woolworth’s and Howard Johnson’ses don’t.”
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