Ancient Grains Archive

The Ruins of Mexico City

We boarded the metro at Chilpancingo and exited at the Tlatelolco stop. We headed to Plaza de las tres Culturas, Plaza of the Three Cultures. A ten-minute walk through a rougher-than-we-were-used-to Mexico City neighborhood, then up a stairway and left onto the overpass. From there we stopped to take pictures and ...Read More

In Which Anna’s Parents Review Paris Fashion Week

The end of Paris Fashion Week brings to a close the major shows of the Spring/Summer 2014 season. You know who has a lot of opinions about clothing? My parents! Though neither of them usually gives much thought to what happens on the runway, there is no shortage of critical fashion analysis ...Read More

What Your Cat’s Indoor/Outdoor Lifestyle Says About You

Your indoor cat: You are sometimes overcome by the irrational and persistent feeling that everyone else you meet at social gatherings has been given a guidebook on how to behave normally and interact smoothly just before you arrived, and that they are secretly glad you have not been given one. You are, for ...Read More

Julie Cooper: Witch-Queen of The O.C.

In Carey McWilliams’s California: The Great Exception, there is a section about a startling type of woman living in the mining towns born in the Gold Rush. These women were neither wives nor mothers. Not maids, not cooks. A popular barroom ballad from the decade: The miners came in forty-nine, The whores in fifty-one; When they ...Read More

Ada Yonath: The Birth of a Scientist

Alexis Coe’s past essays on women’s history for The Toast can be found here. Most recently: Zinaida Portnova: Young Avenger.
As Nancy Hopkins, one of the professors who initiated the study, put it in an online forum: “I have found that even when women win the Nobel Prize, someone is bound ...Read More

Link Roundup!

"If you’re a boy writer, it’s a simple rule: you’ve gotta get used to the fact that you suck at writing women and that the worst women writer can write a better man than the best male writer can write a good woman." - Junot Diaz ...Read More

A Scotswoman And Her Girlfriend Explain Scottish Politics

In 1603, Elizabeth I died heirless and James VI of Scotland became James I of England (the Union of the Crowns). Then in 1707, in a meeting on Edinburgh's North Bridge (apocryphally now a Bella Italia restroom), with protesters thronging the Royal Mile, the Acts of Union were signed, uniting the Scottish ...Read More

Let’s Hear From New Zealand Now

This is not the socialist paradise you're looking for You’ve probably heard of New Zealand, even if you don’t know much about it. You know it’s somewhere, vaguely, down around Australia...ish. What you do know: it’s a magical land of environmental purity, pacifism, and hobbits or something. ...Read More