Last December, the recipients of the 2016 Nobel prizes gathered in Oslo and Stockholm to receive their awards and give lectures in their fields of expertise. Bob Dylan, the notoriously reticent American musician who unexpectedly won the prize in literature, was, expectedly, not among them.
Your friend is about to lead her first board meeting, or walk out in front of 300 students to give her first lecture. You text her your best encouragement: “Everyone thinks you can’t do this. But you can!”
Six months ago, crowds of American women wandered out of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center into the streets of midtown Manhattan, shocked and disappointed to realize the country wouldn’t be electing its first female president, Hillary Clinton. Last night (June 1), the defeated nominee returned to the same spot, hat in hand.
The Scripps National Spelling Bee, in which kids compete to spell increasingly difficult English words, is a two-day, 13-hour nationally televised event. In past years, millions have tuned into sports channel ESPN to watch barely formed teenagers reason through the unpredictable English language. “A lot of it is luck, to be totally honest,” says 2006 winner Kerry Close, now a 23-year-old reporter at Money Magazine.
The joy of the bookstore lies in what might be called the analog experience of the physical space: Hushed page-flipping; the sound of two covers sliding against each other as a book is returned to its spot on the shelf; the quiet murmur of, “Have you read this one?” Luddites and Twitter junkies alike need insulation from the glare of screens and the sounds of speakers.
The US has a new reader-in-chief. Since president Donald Trump doesn’t read much, philanthropist and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates is now the natural successor to Barack Obama and Oprah.
This is what I think a passport looks like:
Tony Schwartz, a man at least partially responsible for the myth of Donald Trump, has an explanation for the US president’s current mental state: Trump is in survival mode.
Bill Gates never completed his four years at Harvard. But for status-obsessed American parents, there’s perhaps no one better to offer advice for blossoming adult children than this college dropout.
It comes in the night. It comes for us all. Imposter syndrome, that constant feeling that you’re about to be revealed as a total fraud, seizes even the most successful among us plebes.
When John F. Kennedy became the youngest person ever to be elected to the US presidency, world leaders were skeptical. A 43-year-old son of a family tantamount to American royalty, Kennedy was dropped into rocky relations with the Soviet Union when he took office in 1961.
In the United States, the number of books translated into English is low: roughly 3% for fiction and poetry (although that may be improving). In children’s literature, it’s even more minuscule. American parents, it seems, aren’t keen on buying their kids books with unfamiliar settings and experiences, and publishers aren’t jumping to spend the money to bring them over.
Until recently, if you bought a new book on Amazon, your default option was to buy that book from Amazon. That’s no longer the case.
The internet has answered the call of one teenager’s extreme hankering for fried food. A post about chicken nuggets is now the most retweeted tweet ever.
A former US president and one of the US’s most prolific writers are getting together to give the country a thrill.
Moses McCormick has an unusual method for learning languages: Roaming the aisles of Walmart.
In the days after the election of US president Donald Trump, some disappointed voters called for national unity, urging Americans to reach across the aisle for mutual understanding and cooperation with the country’s new leader. And some decidedly did not.
Few pieces of punctuation get people’s blood pumping like the Oxford comma.
Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump’s oldest daughter, has a new book out this week called Women Who Work. It’s a bland guide aimed at helping women succeed at the office while balancing their lives. But it’s a distressing read in light of what we know about the author’s father, and his views on women and the workplace.
Stephen Bannon loves fire and brimstone as much as the next political tactician.
Henceforth goop shall take solid form.
Barnes & Noble has been struggling to find someone to helm its drifting ship. After an eight-month search for a CEO, it promoted Demos Parneros to the role, just five months after he joined the company as chief operating officer.
This story contains spoilers to the book and TV adaptation for The Handmaid’s Tale.
Robert M. Pirsig, author of the cult classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, has died. He was 88.
