Listicles, tweets, your ex’s Facebook status, picture of dogs wearing costumes — the internet offers no shortage of entertaining stuff to look at. But there’s plenty of substantial writing out there, too, the pieces you spend a few minutes reading and a long time thinking about after you’ve closed the tab. In this weekly feature, Flavorwire shares the best of that category. This week: Steve Kandell’s moving 9/11 Memorial Museum piece, an elf who drops acid, Ta-Nehisi Coates on reparations, and more.
“The Worst Day Of My Life Is Now New York’s Hottest Tourist Attraction” by Steve Kandell, BuzzFeed
A lot of people have a lot of feelings about the 9/11 Memorial Museum, but nobody has been able to sum them up quite as well as Steve Kandell in this heartbreaking piece. “Everyone should have a museum dedicated to the worst day of their life and be forced to attend it with a bunch of tourists from Denmark,” he writes.
“The Case for Reparations: An Intellectual Autopsy” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic
It seemed like everyone had an opinion about this lengthy piece the minute it was posted online, leading me to believe that they took one look at the headline and made up their mind. Do yourself a favor: take some time out of your day to read the whole thing.
A handy checklist filled with all of the things you don’t want your fiction to be.
“Confessions of a Prep-School Feminist” by Curtis Sittenfeld, The New Yorker
“As a half-Catholic, half-Jewish girl from Ohio, I myself was neither particularly mischievous nor particularly preppy.” Years after publishing her bestselling debut novel Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld tells the real story of her time at Groton.
The title should tell you all you need to know. We just want to know when Shane Dixon Kavanaugh gets his Pulitzer.