Christopher Ketcham takes Harper’s readers through the “antimonopolist history” of Monopoly, “the world’s most popular board game.”
Do Not Pass Go.
Now on Kindle
Three days after Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the Times wrote about Katharine Weymouth taking over the Washington Post, Jeff Farhi reports that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has agreed to purchase the newspaper. Will Bezos follow up his purchase of English™ with a brand-new WaPo style guide?
Rejecting Tidy Narratives
For Lenny, Lidia Yuknavitch talks about suffering, art, and her path to writing. “I believe in art the way other people believe in God,” she says. For more of her writing, check out her Millions essay on grief that births art.
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Dickinson Family Artifacts
You don’t need to visit Houghton Library in Cambridge, MA to check out Emily Dickinson’s family artifacts. You can catch a glimpse from the comfort of your own home.
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Show Me (Don’t Tell Me) State
Tired of the writerly hustle and bustle of New York City? Give Kansas City a try: “People stay here, or move here, because they have the cultural and financial freedom to try shit; if it doesn’t work, they try again.”
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Breaking Newton’s Heart
“Insanity, madness, obsession, math, objectivity, truth, science and art. These friends always impress me. They’re sculptors and tailors, not scientists or spies. I’ve chosen them with the peculiar attentiveness of a shell collector stupidly combining the overwhelming multitude of broken detritus to hold up one shell so beautiful that it finds its way into my pocket, lining my clothes with sand. And then another. Not too many, so that the sheer number could never diminish the value of one.” On madness and genius with cosmologist Janna Levin.
N.K. Jemisin on Octavia Butler
N.K. Jemisin writes an introduction to Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, in a reissued edition coming this April from Grand Central Publishing.
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