Ancient Grains Archive

Here Is Where You Get to Tell Us About Your Favourite Causes

We have lots of glorious opportunities to use lucrative affiliate links to suggest gift ideas for you, but this morning, how about you tell us about your pet projects? What are the philanthropic and charitable and non-profit organizations that have helped you, or that you have helped, or that you think could ...Read More

The Boy Who Cried: How America’s Next Top Model Found Enlightenment

America’s Next Top Model’s twentieth season is the first to include both female and male contestants, and in the episodes aired so far this decision has exploded the show’s uneasy truce with the male gaze, which has always sat awkwardly with the show’s purported commitment to Spice Girls-ian empowerment. Not only has ...Read More

The Causes of Male Hysteria

The following transcript of a speech given at the Ladies' Botany Society of Philadelphia in 1874 was believed to have been lost until it was discovered last month in the attic of a house scheduled for demolition. It has been reprinted here in full for the first time, courtesy of the Lady ...Read More

The Goldfinch: A Book Review

If you came seeking ornithological knowledge about the titular bird, you may click here. I came by my copy of The Goldfinch dishonestly. I helped a friend carry some boxes at the bookstore she works at, and, in return, she said I could help myself to any ...Read More

The N-Word, White People, And The Book of Genesis

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, ...Read More

Relics: Looking Back on a Catholic Childhood

Mary J. Breen's previous work for The Toast can be found here. Most recently: When We Wore Foundation Garments. When I was about ten, my mother gave me a special holy card for my prayer book. I remember it vividly. It was a smudgy cream colour with fading print, and it ...Read More

Hard Work in High Country: Demolition

There are few avenues of life in which violence is sanctioned; fewer still in which it is productive and necessary. Working demolition (“demo,” to its initiates) on houses is one of them. This was what I did this summer. Not with plastics explosives or wrecking balls: with screwguns and sledgehammers and crowbars. And after 10 ...Read More

Victorian Doctor Mad Libs

"It is my belief that an acute [NOUN A] of (the) [NOUN B] is the cause of your [BODY PART] [NOUN C]. The only possible treatment is to apply [NOUN D] [LENGTH OF TIME], otherwise avoiding [OBSOLETE/MADE-UP DISEASE] may prove impossible." ...Read More