Dreamers Rise

By longstanding custom, the origins of which are murky, part of every New Year's Eve is devoted to paying social calls on local livesto...

For a guy who has been making records for something like forty-five years and has a long and complicated discography, Peter Blegvad manages ...

Thomas Pynchon: Rachel and Roony sat on a bench in Sheridan Square, talking about Mafia and Paola. It was one in the morning, a wind had ri...

I read this book by the late Stephen Jay Gould shortly after it was published in 1989, and more or less randomly grabbed it off the shelf an...

One year when I was a kid we took a family camping trip to Quebec. I don't remember much about the trip except that we stayed at least a...

Above, and following: headstones in a burial ground on a former estate, now a public park. Below: the de...

Jenny Uglow, from Hogarth: A Life and a World, on Colonel Francis Charteris (1675-1732), landowner, cashiered military officer, and notorio...

In the 1850s, the Five Points area in lower Manhattan, a now obliterated slum occupying the area adjoining what is now the Foley Square dist...

Feliz día de las mangostas . None of us recalls the text of the law that obliges us to collect the dead leaves, but we are convinced that i...

Two nights after I caught the Vulgar Boatmen show at Martyrs' I headed out to Berwyn, Illinois, on the western outskirts of Chicago, be...

The band known as the Vulgar Boatmen is based in Indiana. They don't play many gigs, and in fact as far as I know they basically don...

From Jude Isabella's article "From Prejudice to Pride," about the history and current state of the Ainu, in the online Hakai ...

"In response to the question 'Why do you play such strange chords, Mr. Monk?' he once told a disc jockey, 'Those easy chor...

It's drizzling today as I write these words, but the woods have been dry for weeks, and with the days getting shorter and the temperatur...

Like many in my generation, I grew up knowing the works of Jules Verne primarily through Hollywood adaptations — mostly bad ones — and comic...

Narceus americanus Do millipedes dream? This one wasn't moving when I found it draped over a dead twig this morning. Its head (to t...

I was walking on a quiet back street in the next town north. Some twenty feet up in the branches of a great oak that rose up next to the si...

It's funny how the world is inside of nothing. I mean, you have your heart and your soul inside of you. Babies are inside of their mot...

More information on DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, can be found here .

Mike Waterson's songs on Bright Phoebus, like the title track or "Rubber Band," which contains such whimsical lines as ...