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Edgar Allan Poe, The Prototypical Broke Freelancer

What most people don’t know is that, 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. Maybe $191,087 seems like a lot of money. And sure, as book advances go, that’d be a generous one, the kind that fellow writers would whisper about. But what if $191,087 was all you got for 20 years of work and the stuff you wrote happened to be among the most enduring literature ever produced by anyone anywhere?

A History Of Time Capsules And What They Say About Us

Slate history maven Rebecca Onion: “Over the 19th and 20th centuries, American time capsules went from containers for civic virtue, to carefully curated museums of popular culture, to catch-alls, capturing the overwhelming amount of stuff that drifts through a consumer society. Looking at the evolution of time capsule contents, it becomes clear that our ideas about which items future historians could use in order to figure out how we lived have changed drastically. But through it all, we’ve retained a touching faith in our own interestingness.”

Can A City Engineer A Great Music Scene Through Public Policy?

The arts often lose when budgets tighten, but even a little coordination by—and representation in—city government can help. “Offices of arts and culture are really about curating relationships and opportunities, and seeing all of the ways a municipality can partner. In order for that to happen, you have to have folks in the room who are specifically thinking about that as an issue area.”

An HBO Cinematographer Talks About How To Properly Light The Faces Of Black Actors

“Any brown person who’s taken a selfie in the club can tell you cameras aren’t made for us. Yet in Insecure‘s club scenes, dark-skinned protagonists like Yvonne Orji’s Molly continue to impress. You can thank Ava Berkofsky, the show’s director of photography, for that. … So how do you make a show look like a piece of art while also doing justice to black faces? The answer is a special whiteboard and a light dab of shiny makeup.”

Preparing The Intricate, Ornate Artwork To Be Burned On The King Of Thailand’s Funeral Pyre

“Nine steel pavilions, rising several stories high, have already been erected at the centre of the royal cremation park, or Sanam Luang. The skeletal thrones that stood bare just weeks ago have now been adorned with gilded and carved cedar, teak and timber. … When it comes to crafting a royal funeral pyre the devil is in the detail. Every carving, flick of the paint brush, or wooden strut has been designed, excoriated and redesigned multiple times.”

David Hockney At 80: Still Stylish, Sunny, And Stubborn (Especially About Smoking)

Deborah Solomon goes to visit the artist in California: “Hockney is still a dapper, vigorous presence. His conversation is wide-ranging and larded with literary references, and his manner is so genial and confiding that at first you do not notice how stubborn he can be. He delights in espousing contrary opinions, some of which come at you with the force of aesthetic revelation, while others seem perverse and largely indefensible.”