Twenty years ago—or even 10—Nashville was falling to the bottom of any list of top U.S. destinations. Music City’s recent resurgence is a reminder of what Americans really value.

An unfinished autobiography and a 1980s biopic turned Frances Farmer, one of the great golden-era stars, into a lobotomized zombie. The main trouble: Frances Farmer wasn’t lobotomized. An investigation to set one of Hollywood’s most convoluted stories straight.

When you’ve long been identified as a “literary type,” how can it be that receiving books as get-well gifts leaves you feeling empty, angry, and determined to chug YouTube straight?

If a person tells a joke in a forest and doesn’t get a laugh—that’s how you know he or she’s a true comic. A report from the 2011 International Society for Humor Studies Conference, where so-called experts of comedy submit themselves to professionals to be critiqued.

When a crime reporter is told an outlandish account, his first obligation is to establish the facts. But when the story turns out to be far more shocking—a conspiracy, in fact, of appalling darkness—it can knock his sense of duty until it cracks.

When you were a toddler, doctors told your parents you had a “failure to thrive.” Which means: You’re small, and you’re going to be short. Later, when medication helps you grow faster than you’ve ever grown before, the hardest part may be deciding when to stop.

Some people keep notebooks. Others keep lists. One type wants to remember; the other wants to forget. What’s not clear is who’s happier for all the scribbling. Confessions of a list-aholic.

Political candidates who want to burn down Washington, DC, perhaps should see what a country looks like with no effective government.

When it comes to in-vitro fertilization, nothing is normal. Your world is upside-down. Then, when every dollar and exertion has gone toward a single hour of hope, it begins to snow.

Tao Lin and his band of followers at Muumuu House are some of the most vehemently disliked—and discussed—writers on the internet. Critics call them hip. Haters call them frauds. But their fiction may be just what our digital lives deserve.