On a rooftop of a prison in South Africa Nelson Mandela tends garden and has a birthday, as my Jamaican grandfather in Harlem, New York raises tomatoes and turns ninety-one. I have taken touch for granted: my grandfather’s hands, his shoulders, his pajamas which smell of vitamin pills… (Read the rest at Graywolf.)
“Even from the very beginning, I was interested in the ways that you love somebody and still betray them or hurt them without meaning to. You know, that kind of thing and how that works in families.” Masha Hamilton, a journalist and novelist and, until recently, the Director of Communications and Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan, spoke . . .
I reviewed Nick Bilton’s Hatching Twitter, a fascinating history of the tweet and its creators, for the technology issue of the New York Times Book Review. Here’s an excerpt: A hundred and forty characters doesn’t sound like much, but as Twitter has shown over the course of its short, intense life, they’re enough to aid a revolution, ruin a reputation or . . .
It was my habit to start the day with a perusal of a few pages of a metaphysical work. It is a practice as healthy to the soul as the morning bath is healthy to the body. Though I have not the kind of intelligence that moves easily among abstractions and I often do not altogether understand what I read . . .