This week, the talented Kelly Link’s Get In Trouble is out this week. You can read a story from the collection here.

Kore Press is having a short fiction contest and I am the judge and perhaps you should enter because there is quite a prize involved. The deadline is Valentine’s Day.

If you are intrigued by mass hysteria, this story is for you.

If you have ever wondered what life was like in 1848, well, there’s also an essay about that.  When I think back to those days, I think “slavery” and am then overcome with gratitude for the 20th and 21st centuries which are marginally better. Also, showers and toilets are cool.

To get dressed in 1848, you have to put your socks and shoes on first. Then comes your underwear, corset, petticoats—thirteen if you’re pursuing the height of fashion—then the skirt, and finally, your bodice. If you try to put your shoes on last, as we do today, you will find you have made a mistake. You can’t bend over with a corset on and your feet are fully lost in the fluff of your skirts.

With NPR’s The Howard Project, four members of the class of 2015 will be keeping audio diaries about the challenges they are facing as graduation looms.

Rich people.

If you don’t want to ship your friends glitter, you can also ship them nothing and if you are doing so, you have money to waste and you can feel free to waste it on me and my desire for a tiny baby elephant.

There is new fiction from the one and only Toni Morrison in The New Yorker.

It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened. It didn’t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs for me to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was so black she scared me. Midnight black, Sudanese black. I’m light-skinned, with good hair, what we call high yellow, and so is Lula Ann’s father. Ain’t nobody in my family anywhere near that color. Tar is the closest I can think of, yet her hair don’t go with the skin. It’s different—straight but curly, like the hair on those naked tribes in Australia. You might think she’s a throwback, but a throwback to what? You should’ve seen my grandmother; she passed for white, married a white man, and never said another word to any one of her children. Any letter she got from my mother or my aunts she sent right back, unopened. Finally they got the message of no message and let her be. Almost all mulatto types and quadroons did that back in the day—if they had the right kind of hair, that is. Can you imagine how many white folks have Negro blood hiding in their veins? Guess. Twenty per cent, I heard. My own mother, Lula Mae, could have passed easy, but she chose not to. She told me the price she paid for that decision. When she and my father went to the courthouse to get married, there were two Bibles, and they had to put their hands on the one reserved for Negroes. The other one was for white people’s hands. The Bible! Can you beat it? My mother was a housekeeper for a rich white couple. They ate every meal she cooked and insisted she scrub their backs while they sat in the tub, and God knows what other intimate things they made her do, but no touching of the same Bible.

The Internet is terrible at archiving itself.

A couple of months ago, I pitched a feature on the music industry that I was totally qualified to write. But the editor questioned my experience: What exactly had I published about the music industry? By my count, over two thousand blogposts since 2009. But the links to my author pages bounced back because the websites had disappeared. Five of years work apparently evaporated from server racks somewhere in New Jersey, as if I had never written anything at all. Come to think of it, had I?

Fictional rich control freak with issues, excerpts thereof.

An essay from Butter columnist Mensah Demary.

Here is what it takes to restore an old theater in Brooklyn.

One of the first things an architect must decide when restoring a historic building is to when, exactly, he is restoring. “We like to pick opening day,” said Adam Field, a project architect at Martinez+Johnson Architecture, which worked on the restoration of Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre.

 

Sometimes, people come together and do good for a fellow human.