The news out of Antarctica this week is terrible. You might assume that I refer to this week’s report of the looming, irreversible collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet that will produce a 10+ foot rise in sea levels in the next 100 years — but that is so terrible as not to qualify…
The polar explorer Felicity Aston is the first woman to traverse Antarctica solo and the first human to do so under her own muscle alone. I met her recently at an event hosted by my university’s Polar Center. In her riveting presentation, drawn from her book Alone in Antarctica (which you must read, and not only because it…
Recently Rolling Stone published a list of the 100 greatest Bruce Springsteen songs of all time as decided by a panel of Rolling Stone judges. Predictably “Born to Run” nabbed the first spot, and predictably, some folks in my earshot complained that Rolling Stone’s panel seemed a little bit white and a little bit male….
I grew up in the North Jersey precincts of Philip Roth and Amiri Baraka, but the literary home of my youth was in the West. My family traveled by motorhome throughout my childhood and I spent most of my summers reading westerns in situ. In the summer of 1985, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove was published…
I avidly follow the sketch series Drunk History. From the first sketch I felt that shared recognition, that moment of contact that readers of nineteenth-century literature will know as a constitutive in the genre of the novel. If you’re not familiar with the Drunk History sketches–a deficiency you should remedy right away–the format is this: for each episode…