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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel "Americanah"
Right now I'm in the midst of reading the novel Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I had listened to her read from a short story in a National Book Awards Author Events podcast, and the quality...
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Susie Middleton: a newly minted farm girl's inspired recipes
Formerly chief editor of Fine Cooking magazine, Susie Middleton ditched the desk job for growing things and raising chickens on Martha's Vineyard, as well as continuing to develop delicious recipes for...
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"Victory Garden" posters / Plants that bees love
The WPA-era posters below used vivid graphics to encourage people to grow their own vegetables. Especially charming is “War Gardens Over the Top,” which shows a youngster with a hoe chasing fleeing...
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Johnny Cash and family, then and now
If you love classic country music, don't miss out on the "lost" Johnny Cash album Out Among the Stars. The 1961 photo of Cash by Art Shay at right is part of an exhibit on Shay's work that appeared at...
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Here a chick, there a chick: vintage Easter images
The iconography of Easter cards = the apotheosis of cuteness. Seriously—we're talking kids, bunnies, birdies, chicks, flowers, colored eggs. Believe it or not, this collection has a low quotient...
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Eliot Porter & Henry David Thoreau: "portraying ecology"
Eliot Porter's exquisite In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World has sold more than 1 million copies. This classic tome combines the words of Henry David Thoreau with large-format color...
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Earth Day call to action: 10 ways to go green and save $$
In honor of Earth Day 2014, we present this guest blog by Diane MacEachern, author of Big Green Purse: Use Your Spending Power to Create a Cleaner, Greener WorldWant to go green but think it’s too...
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The "Sweet Swan of Avon!" is 450 today!
Daedalus Books is celebrating Shakespeare's nativity with a "Spotlight" collection containing a king's ransom of titles by and about the Bard of Avon. And The Daily Glean doeth its part by conjuring up...
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Deifying the lowly dung beetle: how 'Kheper nigroaeneus' hooks up with...
Google's “doodle” for the 44th anniversary of Earth Day was a lovely one, with endearing animated illustrations of the Japanese macaque, the Rufous hummingbird (Selasphorus rufus; found mostly on the...
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Calling all 'Modern-Day Pioneers': growing, brewing, baking, preserving,...
Yes chickens may be involved—but only if you want them to be! You can use Charlotte Denholtz's The Modern-Day Pioneer: Simple Living in the 21st Century as a primer, picking and choosing the skills...
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Eye-catching botantical prints of fruit and vegetables
Here's Joe Whitlock Blundell of the Folio Society on their new title The Herefordshire Pomona, images from which appear above and right: "It is a masterpiece of chromolithography, and the loveliest...
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'Planet Earth': glaciospeleologists, cumulonimbus thunderclouds, and the...
You can learn some nifty new big words as well as looking at awe-inspiring, oversized photographs whilst perusing Planet Earth: An Illustrated History. At left is a limestone pinnacle at New Zealand’s...
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Vintage Mother's Day images & caption contest
Mother's Day comes on apace, so to encourage contemplation of what we owe our maters (for better or for worse), here are some vintage, printable images as well as some humorous ones from those hellions...
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2014 Met Costume Institute Gala
I jumped on the first postings from the 2014 Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute gala last night and spent an enjoyable hour scrolling through hundreds of hits and misses from this annual...
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Shakespeare's mortal—and immortal—remains
I'm still soaking up the coverage in various media of the 450th birthday of the Bard (and wishing I'd be around for the big 500!). Our offerings on the man and his era continue in this Spotlight, which...
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Introducing Angela Thirkell
"Her often caustic wit, her accurate and wickedly funny realisation of unforgettable characters, and her interpolation of an extraordinary range of references and allusions, ranging from Homeric...
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How well do you know your veggies? 23 quiz questions
I enjoyed perusing A Potted History of Vegetables: A Kitchen Cornucopia as much as I did its sister volume (A Potted History of Fruit), so I thought I would cobble together another quiz to test your...
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Permission to do nothing
I resonated so deeply to Sven Birkerts' historical disquisition, in Lapham's Quarterly, on the beneficial nature of doing “nothing” in this day and age of incessant clicking, keying, binge-watching,...
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'Sonata Mulattica'—ode to an obscure genius, friend and rival to Beethoven
Handsome, personable, and a child prodigy, violinist George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower (1778–1860) was the son of a Polish-German mother and an Afro-Caribbean father. His life and times are reborn...
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Outsider artist gets a place in the sun: "Mingering MIke" LP covers (plus...
More than 100 works celebrating “Mingering Mike” and other avatars of his mystery man creator have been newly acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and are being prepared for an exhibition in...
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