Armour Brand Desiccated Thyroid Bottle (c. 1900): The meatpacking empire of Philip Armour and his brilliant scions found a use for every scrap of carcass leftover from production: cheeks and trimmings became sausage; gut, bone and ligament boiled down to gelatin; redder, bloodier entrails were squeezed into cubes of bullion; even bones were burnt to [...]

Graham Greene, an Mi6 correspondent during his days in Lagos, wrote that “espionage today is really a branch of psychological warfare. The main objective is to sow mistrust between allies in the enemy’s camp… The real value of the two scientists [Fuchs and Nunn May] to the Soviet was not from their scientific information but [...]

From Gothamist. When we had an infestation of “the brown bug,” a neighbor told me to take the 7 train to Jackson Heights, get out and go to a Chinese deli where there is an old woman who, for a few $20 bills, will let you take a few scoops of bright yellow powder that [...]

A compelling takeaway I didn’t include in my post about Richard Nash‘s speech was his emphasis on how writers crave community. This was his lead into a demand-based publishing model, and had a queasy resonance for me. I applied to graduate school for this reason — I wanted to find other writers and gather a [...]

Here’s a link to In the Red Room if you feel like reading along…. First gloss: story of a man escorting his elderly parents around Sri Lanka. His mother meets a strange young man in the botanical gardens, who invites them all (quite forcibly) up to his villa. They spend a few tense moments alone [...]

And of course, on the left, my (real life, very red) muse: Thanks to Models.com and V Magazine for the images