Month: August 2026

Posted on by

Dolly Parton’s Children’s Literacy Legacy

Beloved entertainment icon Dolly Parton, who died at age 80 on August 25 after facing cancer, was a woman of many talents—country music superstar, entrepreneur, and philanthropist among them. But she took particular pride in her role as a fierce children’s literacy advocate and founder of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, a program that gifts enrolled children one book per month from birth to age five. The program recently celebrated its 31st year and to date has given away more than 330 million books to more than three million registered children across the U.S., Canada, U.K., Republic of Ireland, and Australia. Read more

Posted on by

How a ’70s Improv Book Became Silicon Valley’s Required Reading

“…It may be true that transforming people’s perceptions of what is possible can help them think more imaginatively. But the tech world’s fascination with improv and theater also reveals a darker philosophy. If all of life is a performance, there are few limits on those willing to take charge of the scene. If nothing is truly real but people’s perceptions — perceptions that a canny actor or founder has the capacity to alter — then misleading investors as to the viability of a start-up, or spreading viral conspiracy theories through social media to affect an election outcome can be reimagined not as lying but as alternate reality-formation, the canny creation of truth by consensus. Distort reality intensely enough, and there’s no such thing as reality at all. And in an era where artificial intelligence can easily conflate collective thought with objective truth, tech founders and those who buy their products are less tethered to the real world. Read more

Posted on by

The Art of the Obituary

…a wry, witty, deeply researched survey of the art and history of the obituary, reflecting on why obituaries matter and what it’s like to be charged with writing them … Roberts ponders the origins of the obituary, muses on the peculiarities of word choice (“In some newspapers, people still ‘pass’ or meet their ‘demise’ or ‘untimely end’ ”), and explores how different publications decide who will be memorialized in their pages and how to address their cause of death. He confides that landing on a succinct description of the latter is often challenging, as illustrated by a list of “actual, incredulous comments from Times obit writers” that includes gems like “Can we say, ‘In a crocodile accident’?” Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence

South African journalist de Greef (Poacher), who has spent years reporting on global psychedelic movements, delivers a chilling saga about a former doctor who spearheaded the rise of toad smoking in the 2010s.

Part exposé, part Mexican travelogue, the narrative profiles Octavio Rettig, who claimed that he cured himself of cocaine addiction by smoking the dried secretions from the Sonoran Desert toad in 2012. The author details how Rettig stripped the rituals of the Indigenous Seri peoples for parts, claiming that the Seris had a long history of smoking the secretions. In addition to the trippy high the practice achieved, Rettig claimed the “medicine” could cure suicidal tendencies, PTSD, and alcoholism, drawing huge crowds to Sonora to attend his rituals. But even at the pinnacle of Rettig’s fame, stories circulated about people dying—including Rettig’s girlfriend—during those rituals. As de Greef digs into those deaths and Rettig’s motives, he takes the narrative on intriguing side quests, including a look at the heaps of corporate money being poured into the development of synthetic toad venom. Propulsive and rigorously reported, this wild work of true crime grips from first page to last. Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)

Posted on by

Here Is Your Scandi Noir Syllabus Courtesy Of Renowned Author, David Lagercrantz

“If Agatha Christie asks, ‘Who did it?’, Nordic crime fiction is more interested in ‘Why did it happen? – and what does it say about our society?” Lagercrantz tells me. “The only thing that’s certain nowadays—or almost certain—is that the protagonists have more problems than the crimes they are trying to solve. There are few happy detectives in Scandi Noir.” Read more

(We earn a small commission if you click above and buy the book at Bookshop.org)