D’Aulnoy’s heroines run away from home, crossdress, shape-shift; they outwit, slay, rescue, lead.

Mark Twain was a prankster, but his belief in telepathy was real enough that he worried about unintentional telepathic plagiarism.

Mark Twain was a prankster, but his belief in telepathy was real enough that he worried about unintentional telepathic plagiarism.

This Valentine's day, we bring you a bit of turn-of-the-century breakup slang

Though we're in the midst of a Mister Rogers biography boom, few people have examined his rabble-rousing college years.

We’re away until January 2, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2018. Enjoy your holiday! Recently, for a background check for a visa, I had to get fingerprinted by an agent admissible to the FBI while I was still in France. N…

From a T. rex with an enormous Twitter following to the first mention of dinosaurs in literature, here’s everything you thought you already knew but didn’t.

  Last summer, the documentarian Marina Zenovich joined some friends for a beachside lunch in Saint-Tropez. She was on holiday from editing her film Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind, which airs on HBO on July 16. The crudités basket arrived, a…

  Recently, for a background check for a visa, I had to get fingerprinted by an agent admissible to the FBI while I was still in France. No, we can’t fingerprint you, the website of the Embassy of the United States in Paris stated clearly. No, you…

  Years ago, the German photographer Jaroslav Poncar told me about running into the legendary French anthropologist Dr. Michel Peissel in Himalaya in the seventies. “People were saying, ‘Peissel is coming! It’s Peissel.’ So I went…

  In Jens Andersen’s biography, published this week in English by Yale University Press, Astrid Lindgren, the famed Swedish author of the Pippi Longstocking series, is a Walden-loving modern mind taken with loneliness. Lindgren, as Andersen notes…

  “Zora!” Alice Walker howled in the cemetery. “I hope you don’t think I’m going to stand out here all day, with these snakes watching me and these ants having a field day.” It was August 1973. Zora Neale Hurston, who was then thirteen…

We’re away until January 3, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2017. Enjoy your holiday!On a  Friday night this spring, I reported to the inaugural show at Fisher Parrish Gallery, in Bushwick. Some awfully cool looking folks we…

  Years ago, my boyfriend and I drove from New York City, where he was from, to Orlando, where I was from and where we were both attending an old liberal-arts college rich in bats and mossy oaks. South, past the Mason–Dixon Line and into the C…

On a Friday night this spring, I reported to the inaugural show at Fisher Parrish Gallery, in Bushwick. Some awfully cool looking folks were packed into the small white space. The table was laid with 117 new examples of paperweights. Almost none of t…

The saga of Scary Lucy.In a no-frills park in Celoron, New York, where Lucille Ball grew up, there stands a four-hundred-pound bronze statue with a puss that’s been likened to Darth Vader, the demonic doll Chuckie, and Kim Hunter in her Planet of the…