It started innocently enough: my first (and probably only) Bumble match wanted to show me his favorite movie, About Time. …

I wrote a piece about wool mittens in November, and a few days before the zine was set to launch, another pair of wool mittens went viral. AFP photographer Brendan Smialowski snapped an image of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders sitting on a folding chair at President Biden’s inauguration. The Senator’s…

1. I’m not entirely sure when everything splintered into fragments. One night I warmed my hands by a fire as a full moon rose above the woods, and then a breeze rustled through palm trees as sand and sweat stuck to my skin, and then a UPS truck kicked up…

Chelsea Batten lives on the Upper Peninsula with her husband and son, only (only!) five hours north of my adopted hometown of Eau Claire, WI. For someone who grew up twenty-five minutes from the border of Maine and forty minutes from the border of Massachusetts, five hours seems like another…

Seven years before I turned seventeen, I was a devoted subscriber of Seventeen magazine. Every month, I cracked open the latest issue and spread it out on the kitchen table. I held it up to my nose on the couch, inhaling the perfume samples, and read it before I fell…

In October I wrote a review of Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest book We Are the Weather, which had been released at the end of August. …

In 1518, the dancing plague struck Strausbourg. A woman took to the streets and danced until she collapsed from exhaustion, then rested and returned to dancing. Before long, she was joined by dozens of others. The number swelled to 400, all afflicted by the same mysterious urge to dance “long…

In the dead of winter, I relocated from Portland, Oregon to Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Donald Trump had just been elected president of the United States, sending shockwaves through the liberal bubble of PDX, as the once-blue state of Wisconsin blushed red. I didn’t have any close friends or family in…