Tag: The Simba Life
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The Relient Case for MMHMM
Mmhmm is Relient K’s best album. I thought so when it was released ten years ago and I think so still today. I was in high school when it dropped, on Election Day 2004. The version of Mmhmm I listened to back then, over and over again, still lays calcified somewhere in my subconscious. So…
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The Simba Life, Thrice
The third issue of my culture magazine The Simba Life is now live. Check out the full PDF, or peruse individual articles. There’s a listacular retrospective, an artistic rediscovery, a debate over which Relient K album is best, a coming-out story you probably have never heard before, and more. Below is the briefing I wrote to…
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Notes on Shady Characters
Keith Houston’s 2013 book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks is like catnip for word nerds. It’s rife with historical trivia about the more uncommon punctuation marks that have littered language history, including the pilcrow (¶), dagger (†), and interrobang (‽). It also provides background on the symbols we…
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Unprofessional Confessions with Rich Dyson
Rich Dyson is the author of Bearly Dad and You Are: A Lump’s Tale About Image, and the editor of Absolutely Unprofessional. He’s also an old friend from my days working at summer camp. We chatted about the value of the printed page and his newest venture writing for/with his kids. (Illustrations by Rich Dyson)…
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Read books. Often. Mostly print.
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, made this plain yet meaty declaration concerning best food practices in a 2007 article called “Unhappy Meals” for The New York Times Magazine. It has resonated with me since I read it recently. Deceptively simple, each…
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An Exchange of Words with Alena Graedon
Alena Graedon, author of The Word Exchange, was kind enough to chat about the process of bringing her first novel to life and where she finds solitude in a noisy world. (This interview appears in the second issue of the Simba Life Quarterly.) Comello: First off, how has the response been to the book? Any surprising reactions…
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Snow Bank Stories
On my block the snow banks reign. They billow with the winter, building girth with every snowfall and polar vortex. This winter has been especially harsh. The banks are bloated with layers of snow that together tell the story of the season. The inch in late November sits at the bottom, hugging the frozen tundra and…
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The Simba Life Quarterly
“Either run from it or learn from it.” This has been the motto and mission of The Simba Life as I’ve used it since its birth in 2006. My inspiration for the name came from The Lion King, but I’ve long desired to wrestle the Simba name and its connotations away from Disney’s grasp and forge for…