jessanne collins

Oh hi. It's a slushy Saturday so I made a list of my favorite stories published in mental_floss magazine in 2014.* 

How Moby Dick (and a bromance gone bad) wrecked Herman Melville's life

A pretty amazing gun-toting bike-riding rock-studying First Lady

What's really going on underground at a forensic "body farm"?

The woman who mapped the Atlantic ocean

The time HP Lovecraft was a total weirdo

In three words—Love's Baby Soft—you can say a lot about "youth," and also, importantly, viscerally: "my youth!" You can capture something of "late-century America" and a little bit of wistful "hope." Innocence and exploitation? Sure. But the most important thing there was, then, in that bottle was the extraordinary capacity for the cultivation of self.