April White

In the category of "all too relevant." From me, over at Popular Science:

This week on the podcast, @aprwhite.bsky.social, author of The Divorce Colony, joins us to discuss How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier.

Listen: creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/...

Transcript: www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/u...

Seeking Clues in Cabinet Cards - JSTOR Daily The poignant images, at once banal and intimate, in the Lynch Family Photographs Collection contain mysteries perhaps only the public can solve.

Bluesky historians, assemble! Who are the people in these mostly anonymous photos from the Xavier University of Louisiana archives? daily.jstor.org/clue-seeking...

The “Vanishing Types” of Doris Ulmann - JSTOR Daily As her extensive body of work shows, Ulmann felt the loss of an imagined simpler time and tried to preserve it with her camera.

I'm having fun over at JSTOR Daily again. This time I'm wandering through their awesome shared photo collections for my new monthly column Archive Adventures: daily.jstor.org/the-vanishin...

People, stories, unfinished

April White Talks The Divorce Colony On the Season One Finale of Neighborhood Bookstore, historian and journalist April White discusses her narrative nonfiction book THE DIVORCE COLONY

The very best part about writing THE DIVORCE COLONY is reconnecting with old friends. Eric Harper and I could talk about *anything.* For this ep of Neighborhood Bookstore we (mostly) stuck to feminism, paparazzi, Westerns, railroads, archives, and the contentious past and uncertain future of divorce

Surviving the Iditarod Adventurer Sunny Stroeer (MBA 2011) is always hunting for her limit. Would she find it while skiing 1,000 miles through the Alaskan wilderness?

May we all find what Sunny Stroeer did on the Iditarod Trail: "I was having a good day when I spent 14, 15, 16 hours just in my head...that is such a relief compared to day-to-day life and the stresses of...just being a human in the 21st century, you know?" www.alumni.hbs.edu/stories/Page...

‎White Picket Fence: Our Divorce Dilemma on Apple Podcasts ‎Show White Picket Fence, Ep Our Divorce Dilemma - Jul 2, 2024

And now for something...well, just as depressing as everything else: Me and a bunch of super smart people on the dangers of limiting access to divorce, which is, unbelievably, a thing again podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/o...

Travel guides seem to be written for people for whom any city is a foreign place. I read one with a very long, detailed explanation about how to exit a subway car in Buenos Aires. It’s…just a subway

Episode 273: The Demon Spread (06.21.2024) “The ingenuity of depraved human genius has culminated in the production of margarine.”

Always so much fun to contribute to the Criminal podcast. Me on "the demon spread" and the weird history of oleo margarine smuggling: thisiscriminal.com/episode-273-...

Airtable has been fantastic for my current project, which is as delightfully fiddly as yours sounds like it is

How Artificial Snow Was Invented You don't have to ski on cornflakes because Hollywood's quest for authenticity on-screen triggered an avalanche of frozen innovation

I had a great deal of fun researching the guy who tried to change this: www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture...

Booze-Free Rhubarb Lime Gimlet Recipe In this no-alcohol libation, the rhubarb shrub mimics the flavor and intensity that alcohol would bring to a gimlet.

Very much this: www.seriouseats.com/alcohol-free...

Wonder Is Everywhere: A Giant Burger, a Missing Warhol, and More From Around the Web Get a peek into what we’re obsessed with right now.

This week in news you need: A missing Warhol, a 250-year-old history mystery and a gigantic hamburger in the sky www.atlasobscura.com/articles/won...

Wonder Is Everywhere: Ancient Lipstick, Darwin’s Library, and More From Around the Web Get a peek into what we’re obsessed with right now.

You’ve got to read about the biggest art fraud in history—uncovered just last years by authorities in Canada. Plus more unbelievable story recommendations:

Divorce & What It Means to Choose Yourself — Thread the Needle Calling all divorcees & divorce curious! Going through a divorce is a decidedly sucky process. While still taboo, the dreaded D word is extremely common—in the U.S., about 1 million women file for d...

I'm at that part of the book process where the interviews aren't about THE DIVORCE COLONY exactly, but about the history of divorce more generally and it's so cool to see people responding to/building on this story and its legacy. Thanks to Donna Shill for asking me to be on this thoughtful podcast

Suddenly feeling an intense need to take a road trip to...nowhere in particular

Wonder Is Everywhere: A Jumping Japanese Cryptid, Ancient Amazonian Cities, and More From Around the... Get a peek into what we’re obsessed with right now.

The fun of writing for Atlas Obscura is being free to shout out stories about a Japanese cryptid, a Nigerian music phenomenon, an ancient Amazonian city and a Virginian gas station/church, all in the same article

Wonder Is Everywhere: The Cosmic Dust Curator, a Secret Ancient Forest, and More From Around the Web Get a peek into what we’re obsessed with right now.

Reconsidering my career choices, now that I know "cosmic dust curator" is an actual job. Plus other cool things I learned this week:

I’ve had luck with finding ads or articles in digitized newspaper archives to answer questions like this

Albert Einstein is shown in a black-and-white photo from 1921 standing under a large telescope, surrounded by the staff of Yerkes Observatory—nearly half of whom are women.

A couple of years ago some researchers at the University of Chicago looked at this century-old photo of Albert Einstein at Yerkes Observatory and thought "huh, I wonder who all those women are?"

As you might expect, the answer is fascinating: www.atlasobscura.com/articles/yer...

Wonder Is Everywhere: Silk Dress Secret, the Last Lightkeeper, and More From Around the Web Get a peek into what we’re obsessed with right now.

Some wondrous stories to start the new year, including @restofworld.org’s delightful dictionary of lol and @hakaimagazine.bsky.social’s portrait of the US’s last lighthouse keeper.

Plus: A coded message hidden in a 19th-century silk dress finally revealed

Wonder Is Everywhere: Avian Love, Medieval Myths, and More From Around the Web Get a peek into what we’re obsessed with right now.

What a treat to spend my time reading the most wondrous stories on the internet, like Terrence McCoy on the decades-long love affair of Romeo and Julieta—two macaws in Rio.

Plus: Egyptian artifacts buried in Scotland, a hammerhead shark nursery and 1 million new homes in Pakistan

Wonder Is Everywhere: Viking Hoaxes, a Secret Nuclear Ice Base, and More From Around the Web Get a peek into what we’re obsessed with right now.

Let's start the week off right with amazing stories about the benefits of walking backwards, the geological origins of the Great Sphinx, the American tradition of forging Viking artifacts, the dream of secret city under Greenland's ice...and much more

Wonder Is Everywhere: Ancient Lampreys, Outdoor Learning, and More From Around the Web Get a peek into what we’re obsessed with right now.

This week in Wonder is Everywhere: Explore the remote cybercrime haven of Tokelau with @jacobjudah.bsky.social and @techreview.bsky.social and blame your nightmares about giant flesh-eating lampreys on Smithsonian Magazine.

Replica of stationary from the Cataract hotel in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, circa 1900, made to celebrate the publication of The Divorce Colony

100% normal (says the author who made replica stationary for her thank you notes)

Unearthing Gems in a Massive Archive of Rock Star Interviews “They are unpolished and unvarnished.”

Yes, you need to hear Gladys Knight opine on football, Tammy Wynette introduce her four-pound Pomeranian, Killer, and Aerosmith joke about New Kids on the Block. Just a few of the treasures from music journalist Larry Katz's decades of superstar interviews. (Now fully digitized!)

This is a week in need of a little wonder. Let’s go in search of the world’s oldest trees with @geohumanist.bsky.social and meet the community saving the the world’s heaviest ball of twine. More at Atlas Obscura: www.atlasobscura.com/articles/won...

What I’m reading right now: Tales of an accidental mummy, a murdered tree, multiplying fairy circles, disappearing sharks, mysterious tarot cards, an “enchanting” tarantula and more. Check out Wonder is Everywhere on Atlas Obscura www.atlasobscura.com/articles/won...

Oh, it would have been polite to introduce myself, huh? 

Hi.

I mine the archives for stories from our shared past that help us understand the weird/scary/but-also-amazing present. Here I'll be posting about the fascinating stuff I’m reading and the historical rabbit holes I (happily) fall into