Meet Jesse Welles, the Folk Singer Who Turns News into Folk Music, Writing Songs on Elections, Plane Crashes, Ozempic & More

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At first glance, Jesse Welles resem­bles noth­ing so much as a time trav­el­er from the year 1968. That’s how I would open a pro­file about him, but The New York Times’ David Peis­ner takes a dif­fer­ent approach, describ­ing him record­ing a song in his home stu­dio. “Welles, a singer-song­writer with a shag­gy, dirty-blond mane…

Flannery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand

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In a let­ter dat­ed May 31, 1960, Flan­nery O’Con­nor, the author best known for her clas­sic sto­ry, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (lis­ten to her read the sto­ry here) penned a let­ter to her friend, the play­wright Mary­at Lee. It begins rather abrupt­ly, like­ly because it’s respond­ing to some­thing…

How the Fairlight CMI Synthesizer Revolutionized Music

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In the cred­its of Phil Collins’ No Jack­et Required appears the dis­claimer that “there is no Fairlight on this record.” Cryp­tic though it may have appeared to most of that album’s many buy­ers, tech­nol­o­gy-mind­ed musi­cians would’ve got it. In the half-decades since its intro­duc­tion, the Fairlight Com­put­er Musi­cal Instru­ment, or CMI, had reshaped the sound…

Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Manuscripts: Before the Word Processor & White-Out

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Before the word proces­sor, before White-Out, before Post-It Notes, there were straight pins. Or, at least that’s what Jane Austen used to make edits in one of her rare man­u­scripts. In 2011, Oxford’s Bodleian Library acquired the man­u­script of Austen’s aban­doned nov­el, The Wat­sons. In announc­ing the acqui­si­tion, the Bodleian wrote:

The…

What It Was Like to Get a Meal at a Medieval Tavern

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At least since The Can­ter­bury Tales, the set­ting of the medieval tav­ern has held out the promise of adven­ture. For their cus­tomer base dur­ing the actu­al Mid­dle Ages, how­ev­er, they had more util­i­tar­i­an virtues. “If you ever find your­self in the late medieval peri­od, and you are in need of food and drink, you’d bet­ter…