Two pieces on the latest internet superphenomenon, Pinterest: first, Rob Horning in New Inquiry:

Pinterest has entered the mainstream, as a para-retailing apparatus presumed to appeal mainly to women. The site’s supposed femaleness has occasioned a lot of theorizing, some of which Nathan...

Stephanie Strom in the NYT:

The cost of claiming a legitimate income tax refund in Hyderabad, India? 10,000 rupees.

The going rate to get a child who has already passed the entrance requirements into high school in Nairobi, Kenya? 20,000 shillings.

The expense of obtaining a driver’s...

Richard Florida in The Atlantic:

What lies behind the inequality of American cities? The conventional explanation blames the rise of the globalized, knowledge economy which has eliminated family-supporting factory jobs and cleaved the workforce into high-paying, high-skill and low-paying,...

Amitava Kumar talks to the author in The Paris Review:

Hari Kunzru’s latest novel, Gods Without Men, is being released in the U.S. today. Set in the Mojave Desert, the novel is an echo chamber for stories divided across more than two centuries. The clever symmetries that link the stories...

From The New Yorker:

At any given moment, Pääbo has at least half a dozen research efforts in progress. When I visited him in May, he had one team analyzing DNA that had been obtained from a forty- or fifty-thousand-year-old finger bone found in Siberia, and another trying to extract DNA...

From Orion Magazine:

My name is called, and a doctor I’ve never met performs a scan of my ovaries. I take notes in a blank book I’ve filled with four-leaf clovers found on my river walks: Two follicles? Three? Chance of success 15–18 percent. On the way out, I steal the journal with the...

Hello,

The voting round of our arts & literature prize (details here) is over. A total of 1,029 votes were cast for the 56 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

Carla Goller has designed a "trophy" logo that our top...

“I think I’ll write a book today,” the writer Georges Simenon was said to tell his wife at breakfast. “Fine,” she would reply, “but what will you do in the afternoon?” Winston Churchill was similarly prolific, and not just in the field of letters [1]. In his later years, he...

I missed the news of Wisława Szymborska‘s funeral earlier this month, and only just found this youtube clip of the quiet, secular ceremony that nevertheless attracted more than a thousand people in a Polish winter. According to the Associated Press: Freezing temperatures and...

In Russia, poetry can make things happen. In February 2011—two months after the handsome young lawyer Alexei Navalny launched his game-changing anti-corruption website, Rospil.info—a writer, an actor and a theatre producer teamed up on a different kind of internet project, which they...