Fruitlands

To live in the experimental Alcott household known as Fruitlands must have been fraught with dizzying chaos and unease, but to read about Bronson Alcott's madcap 19th-century utopian schemes is pure pleasure. Richard Francis transports us  to a time when America was only half-fashioned, and any wild-eyed dream seemed capable of enactment.

May 22: The video game Pac-Man, featuring "the most iconic character from the golden age of arcade video games," was released on this day in 1980. Over the next decade, gamers spent over $2.5 billion in quarters…

Ethan Rutherford and Matt Burgess (Dogfight: A Love Story) on the writing of Rutherford's surreal and fiercely funny story collection The Peripatetic Coffin

advertisement