Molly Labell

Braille: You’ve seen it, you've felt it, but unless you or someone close to you is visually impaired, you might not have thought much about it. I was one of those people — aware of the importance of braille for blind readers but without any real…

Every college has a bookstore, but think about yours — what was the ratio of books to other crap? The first college I went to was in a small city and the school had a bunch of mini-convenience stores, so the bookstore ended up selling fairly…

“I want to tell my stories,” Lena Dunham writes in her new book Not That Kind of Girl, “and, more than that, I have to in order to stay sane.” Dunham must be feeling very grounded, then: Not That Kind of Girl is stuffed to the gills with…

You might think you know all there is to know about Lena Dunham: She’s not exactly the poster-child for coyness. But like every good writer, Dunham’s got an arsenal of secrets to tantalize readers with in her new book Not That Kind of Girl, and each…

You may have heard that Lena Dunham’s first book, Not That Kind of Girl, was just released. Her collection of essays (and a few lists) touch on the kind of things you’d expect the Girls creator to write about: therapy, internet crushes during the…

"Alt lit." Do you know what it is? Does anyone know what it is? Here's what I've scraped together: it’s not quite alternative literature, as the name would suggest, but shorthand for "hipster lit" (referencing Hipster Runoff’s tendency to call…

One of my favorite professors in college told me that at an annual English professor conference (it had a fancier title, I'm sure), she and a group of new friends played a game during some downtime; over drinks, they all had to go around and say one…

What did you do during your college years? For most people, college is a time to cultivate new friendships and explore newfound academic interests. I spent my four years writing long papers about presidential libraries and feminist food theory,…

I’ve never had an easy time falling asleep — I can’t quite turn my brain off most nights, and I always need an activity to separate my day from my night, a little bit of relaxation to mark time. For me and for many others, reading a book is just the…