Ancient Grains Archive

Cook County Schools and Cook County Jails

In the summer of 2011, I had two jobs. One was in the Cook County Jail’s drug treatment facility, Division VI; the other was at a summer school on the South Side for Chicago public schools. The similarities were chilling. The inmates of both places were delivered the same bland, partially frozen ...Read More

Rejected McSweeney’s Lists

Bill & TED’s Talks: The Transformative Power of Phone Booths How To Be Your Most Excellent Self Sustainable Development The Genghis Khan Way The Dao of Dude Beneath Our Hats: Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln On Partying The Unbearable Lightness of Bogus Joan Of Arc Presents: Stop, Drop and Roll Socrates: Man, Method, Crate Statistical Term, Celebrity Baby Name or Yiddish? ...Read More

Unpopular On Netflix

Gay And Lesbian Dramas You Will Watch With Your Socially Conscious Girlfriend Only Out Of A Sense of Political Obligation Thrillers Based On Novels Sold in Airports That You Have Also Seen At Your Grandmother's House Period Dramas, Non-Regency England, Non-Roaring Twenties Mind-Benders You Watched Alone On Your Laptop While Extremely High And Can't Bear ...Read More

Bird of the Month: The Albatross

The most famous albatross in the world is dead: shot by the Mariner in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s long, strange  1798 poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." This is a shame, not just because the mariner spends the rest of his life under a curse, but because a dead albatross cannot fly, ...Read More

The New Eves: Women Writing Science Fiction, Saving the World

It might be a bit apples and oranges to compare the current comic-book-blockbuster landscape to the last century of science fiction magazines. Nonetheless, as I worked my way through New Eves, an anthology of lady-penned science fiction from decades past, this is the comparison that came to ...Read More

Your Funniest Tweet

When you read this, I will be on a plane with a toddler with motion sickness, so what better time to allow others to chatter happily amongst themselves, free from that particular torment? There is nothing worse than tweeting something incredibly funny at a time of day when no one notices it, or ...Read More

The Ghosts of Gettysburg

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is a haunted town. It makes sense:  The town has 350 years of triumphs and tragedies in its past. Besides the infamous battle that ravaged the town and surrounding farmland and included one civilian death, Gettysburg was home to ...Read More

Out There: Barbara McMartin and the Adirondack Discover Series

“Do you have Barbara?’ I asked my friend Anne. “Let me see what she says about this.”

We were standing in Anne’s kitchen in Syracuse, surrounded by backpacks, bear canisters and socks. It was a broiling July evening and we had a 4:30 am start the next morning. Anne put down the ...Read More