What exactly happens to our brains when we laugh? Richard Restak (of The American Scholar) investigates.
Joke Science
Ernest Hemingway in Cuba
A restoration center has opened on Hemingway's property in Cuba, with holdings that include manuscripts, letters, and photographs.
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The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up a Library
Summer Brennan attempts the Marie Kondo approach to organizing her library and learns about the heartbreaking difficulty of getting rid of books. Pair with this Millions essay on private libraries and what books reveal about their readers.
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Paperback Swap
Paperback Swap lets you can swap your books with other community members.
The Marriage Plot Problem
Have novels about love lost their gravitas as women’s liberation and divorce culture have taken over? Adelle Waldman doesn’t think so. In The New Yorker, she defends the timelessness of the marriage plot. “As long as marriage and love and relationships have high stakes for us emotionally, they have the potential to offer rich subject material for novelists, no matter how flimsy or comparatively uninteresting contemporary relationships seem on their surface.” Pair with: Our Jeffrey Eugenides essay on writing The Marriage Plot, which is referenced several times in Waldman’s essay.
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