Catherine Baab-Muguira

Few creative careers that have risen to such heights have also been conducted under so much stress— financial stress, professional stress, familial stress, psychosexual stress—and it shows in his work.

Poe is remembered as the inventor of the horror genre, thanks to Halloween-friendly poems and stories like “The Raven” and “The Tell-tale Heart.” But his creative work can be seen as another kind of business enterprise, charting his valiant but often futile attempts to “coin one’s brain into silver.” This makes him an instructive example today, when new technologies mean that creators face some of the very same problems that they did in the 19th century, including an oversupplied market and the proliferation of free content.

Doubling down on your ambitions is the best way to get revenge, and no one ever knew this better than Poe.

If you’ve read any self-help before, then you know that most of it reads like a 90-percent redacted NSA document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request—all the most salient details blacked out, unavailable. Exactly how many nannies, for instance, did it take for Sheryl Sandberg to Lean In? If the Rich Dad, Poor Dad guy is such a financial genius, how come he shills real-estate seminars? And if Rachel Hollis really knows how to have a successful, sexy marriage, why’d she get div...

Edgar Allan Poe articulated the Big Bang theory some 75 years before scientists advanced the idea. At least, that’s become the conventional wisdom.

I’d like to float a fresh theory about Edgar Allan Poe's 1839 short story “William Wilson,” which I think casts light on Jordan Peele's new movie Us, too.

Holmes may not be a genius inventor, but she's certainly a genius. She used to depict herself as a Palo Alto Marie Curie. Now she looks more like an IRL Lady Macbeth, all bloody hands, ruthless ambition, and fake baritone.

If people know Kingsley Amis’s work, they tend to know his name-making first novel, 1954’s Lucky Jim, or perhaps The Old Devils, which won the Booker Prize in 1986. It’s a shame, because Take a Girl Like You is among his best—a great work of art, deeply moral and wonderfully realized. A lost classic.

“My mom had five kids by the time she was my age. My dad was starting his second career. And I’m still punching in my parents’ landline at CVS to get the discount.”

Pam Beesly broke my heart. It wasn’t so much that she married someone else—namely Dunder Mifflin paper salesman Jim Halpert. It was that she first dropped out of art school in New York, schlepped back home to Scranton, and then got married.

Gaby Dunn can't listen to her own podcast — at least not the early episodes. "I'm really embarrassed about things that I said," she admits, particularly the details she revealed about her bank balance and conversations she'd had with her student-loan servicer. But that's exactly what makes "Bad With Money With Gaby Dunn" so fresh.

For his entire oeuvre—all his fiction, poetry, criticism, lectures—Poe earned only about $6,200 in his lifetime, or approximately $191,087 adjusted for inflation.

On November 9, millions of people woke up to a nightmare. But Tim Heidecker, who writes and stars in Adult Swim’s Decker, found himself in an eerily, uncannily prescient position.

When I realized my hair was turning orange under the white dye goo, I finally hit send on the text I was hoping to avoid: “EMERGENCY. I’m getting something really stupid done to my hair.”

What happens when a generation raised with a “you can be whatever you want to be” ethos meets the worst job market in years?