If you’re an insomniac, you probably feel an odd kinship with people who work the night shift, especially if you live in a large city which is easy to explore on sleepless nights. At The Rumpus, Jess Lowry recalls her own late nights in Manhattan.
Up with Me
Public Solitude
“You can’t be worrying how you sound. You can’t wonder whether you or your characters are likable or smart or interesting. You have to be inside the scene—the tactile world of tables and chairs and sunlight—attending to your characters, people who exist for you in nonvirtual reality.” Paris Review editor Lorin Stein writes for The New York Times about solitude in the age of the Internet and the future of the book.
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Doing More With Less
Nollywood is the name given to Nigeria's $500 million movie business. For about the same amount of money that was spent on the promotion and production of James Cameron's Avatar, Nollywood is able to churn out a thousand films each year, trailing only Bollywood and Hollywood in terms of revenue.
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“Who Speaks Wukchumni?”
Recommended viewing: "Who Speaks Wukchumni?"
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Soder v. Soda
The popularity of Joshua Katz’s American dialect maps inspired The Atlantic to create their own dialect video. In it, Atlantic staff members call people from across the country, recording them so listeners can hear their accents, and ask them to answer questions from a 2003 Harvard survey.
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Doomed Love on Valentine’s Day
Valentine's Day may be all about happy couples, but the most memorable love stories in literature are tales of doom, from Oedipus to Romeo and Juliet to the many dysfunctional partnerships that populate contemporary literature. The Guardian offers a literary lovers' quiz for the lovelorn.
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Wild Ride
A lot of women feel a connection to Cheryl Strayed, but one reader's connection was personal. Strayed's lost half-sister found her when she just happened to check out Wild because she liked travel narratives. "She didn't know anything about me except when she read the description in my book of my early life, my mother and my father, she knew that father was hers, too. I don't name my father in the book but she recognized him," Strayed told NPR.
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