Cris Beam left her mother's home at age 14, driven out by a suburban household of hidden chaos and mental illness. The two never saw each other again. More than twenty years later, after building the happy home life she'd never had as a child, Beam learned of her mother's death and embarked on a quest to rediscover her own history. What follows is an excerpt from her nonfiction account, Mother, Stranger, published today by The Atavist. It is available as an ebook single for the Kindle, The Nook, the iPad or iPhone and other outlets via The Atavist website. READ MORE

Starting today, to keep you entertained in this dark week, a short series of essays on the topic, fairly loosely, and some short, some long, of "Milestones"—very recent little bits of history that reverberate today. Enjoy, with our thanks for a long and overall wonderful year. READ MORE

A Tea People's History, by Alex Pareene, illustrated by Ian Huebert: ebook, $2.99.

"He turns on a police scanner and also a Clippers – Raptors game on the radio (I know! Who cares about the Clippers? But be patient—all will be revealed), and takes some care to balance the volume of the two. He hears the break-in reported on the scanner but remains calm. He hears that units are being dispatched to the area, and still, he is unperturbed. One of the two robbers comes back but the other dallies, and the first robber is nervous, but Ryan Gosling is chill. You will notice that Ryan Gosling remains calm pretty much all the time. One wonders if his forbearance comes from his state of namelessness, which, while presumably of his own choosing, must also lead to some confusion (like later in the film, when he calls his neighbor's seven-year-old and says, 'It's me,' and the kid is like, 'Hi,' and Ryan Gosling is like, 'Is your mother there?' and the kid is like, 'She's talking to the police right now,' and Gosling is like, 'Well, tell her I called,' which is all normal, but we're left to wonder what the kid will tell her. 'He called.' 'Who?' 'You know—him. The guy.'). Anyway, finally the other robber gets there and Ryan Gosling starts driving, and he's listening to the police scanner and playing a cat-and-mouse game with the cops, who have gotten a report of a silver Impala (darn! shoulda just gone with a Mustang or something), which involves pulling behind a parked truck and killing the lights, hiding under an overpass to avoid the roving spotlight of a police helicopter, and, briefly, accelerating and doing crazy skid-turns to shake one cruiser that has actually turned its flashing lights on and started to give chase." READ MORE

We cordially invite you to turn off the Internet until Monday morning at 9 a.m. Or, fine, if you insist: READ MORE

"I met another guy who was funny and went to film school at NYU. He was twenty-two and had a tiny apartment on Great Jones Alley and I thought he might make a suitable boyfriend, or at least a suitable deflowerer. He was older, he’d done it before, and, I had been told, all men were dying to have sex at all times, so it would be easy enough to get him on board with my project. It was harder than I thought. He was eager to make out and grope, but to my surprise and disgust, he seemed very uneasy about engaging in actual intercourse once I admitted—in the most blasé terms—that it would be my first time. It is possible this young man had located the term “statutory rape” somewhere in the back of his head. Or, perhaps his father or mother had warned him that girls get attached to their first lover—you break it you bought it, or some such. But his reluctance was no match for my romantic poetry: I told him that he didn’t have to worry about me falling in love with him, and that if he wouldn’t sleep with me I’d find someone else who would. As it happened, we split the difference." READ MORE

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