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Katz’s Deli, the iconic New York deli, has been serving its customers for well over 100 years. Getty Images Elon Musk once compared building a business to “eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.” George Orwell, for his part, once described writing a book as a “bout with a long illness,” a sentiment that many entrepreneurs and creatives would agree with. The point is: No one would willingly subject themselves to any of the suffering that goes into building something if they thought their efforts were going to disappear with the wind. Yet the truth is, most businesses and most art does disappear. It might be easier than ever today to start a business—a few bucks on LegalZoom and you’re the CEO of a brand new LLC. What is still hard and what has always been hard it keeping your doors open, staying in business, and keeping customers happy over the long term will never be easy. In a world obsessed with the new and the trendy, we don’t tend to give enough credit to people do ma...

Game of Thrones seventh season started with one of the most powerful scenes in show history. It looked like retribution for the Red Wedding would be limited to Arya killing Walder Frey , so watching her poison those responsible exceeded even our wildest expectations. Unfortunately that incredible scene was not a harbinger of things to come, because while this season has arguably been Game of Thrones ‘ most exciting, it has also been its worst. The show’s creators have made plenty of mistakes over the years (some major), but these bad decisions and episodes of  poor judgment felt more like swing-and-a-miss-es, not bona fide laziness . Through the first 60 episodes, only two things stood out as being either unforgivably inane or bad TV tropes: Jaime and Bronn’s absurd plot to sneak into Dorne, and a lot of “The Battle of the Bastards.” They stood out because of how rare those illogical moments were from the show. But poor writing has defined this current season, with a consistency of ...

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER FOR 1866. VIII. HOW SHALL WE ENTERTAIN OUR COMPANY? “T he fact is," said Marianne, "we must have a party. Bob don't like to hear of it, but it must come. We are in debt to everybody: we have been invited everywhere, and never had anything like a party since we were married, and it won't do." "For my part, I hate parties," said Bob. "They put your house all out of order, give all the women a sick-headache, and all the men an indigestion; you never see anybody to any purpose; the girls look bewitched, and the women answer you at cross-purposes, and call you by the name of your next-door neighbor, in their agitation of mind. We stay out beyond our usual bedtime, come home and find some baby crying, or child who has been sitting up till nobody knows when; and the next morning, when I must be at my office by eight, and wife must attend to her children, we are sleepy and headachy. I protest against making overtures to entrap some hund...

The sky grew dark and the sun couldn’t be seen as 2:22 p.m. arrived Monday . Just as the scientists predicted, right? Not exactly. Clouds stole the show from the sun and the moon, at least in the sky above Terre Haute. The visibility of the United States’ first coast-to- coast solar eclipse in 99 years ended right as the celestial display got interesting. At around 1:53 p.m., clouds covered the unfolding eclipse — fluffy white clouds, at first, then light gray and then darker ones. Hauteans saw only the early stage of the eclipse. The Wabash Valley lies northeast of the 70-mile-wide “path of totality” — a swath running through 14 states, from Oregon to South Carolina. Yet, local folks could’ve seen a near-total eclipse, with 94.2 percent of the sun obscured by the moon at the peak of a process lasting from 12:55 p.m. to 3:47. But clouds, along with lightning and rain, covered the view at 1:53 and didn’t disappear until after 4 p.m. Disappointing, eh? Especially with...

We’re pleased to share the prelude, titled Freundschaft, of Kristen Ghodsee’s upcoming book Red Hangover: Legacies of Twentieth-Century Communism. In Red Hangover Ghodsee reflects on the lived experience of postsocialism and how many ordinary men and women across Eastern Europe suffered from the massive social and economic upheavals in their lives after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This text is not final, but we hope it gives you a taste of this impactful new book, to be published in late October. Two pairs of earrings, four bracelets, and a mixtape inspired me to write this book. I was in the Stadtmuseum in the German city of Jena, peering into the various display cases of an exhibit called Freundschaft! Mythos und Realit ät im Alltag der DDR (Friendship! Myth and reality in everyday life in the GDR [German Democratic Republic]). The exhibit ruminated on the official and unofficial uses of the word “friendship” in the context of communist East Germany between 1949 and 1989. In one c...