Articles by Jessica Pearce Rotondi
For centuries, women have gone to unnatural and even deadly lengths for beauty. Commoners and queens have covered their faces in lead, ingested arsenic and stuffed their feet, waists and breasts into various binds, all in the name of an ever-shifting ideal. Yet, the history of beauty is also one of agency. Women have leveraged the burden of beauty standards to build community and businesses—and to assert power through their own appearance.
Feature for The History Channel
With their vast scale and technological advances, these gardens of empire bent nature—and their subjects—to the ruler’s will. The plants and people collected within them represented the lands they controlled, placing status, wealth and power at the root of these man-made Edens.
Feature for The History Channel
The Paris Catacombs draw thousands of visitors a year, but few know the macabre tunnels' unusual history. While the tunnels are named after the Catacombs of Rome, which were built in the first century by Christians and Jews forced to perform their burial rites in secret, the catacombs of Paris were founded in the 18th century in response to two secular problems: sinkholes and a surplus of dead bodies.
Christmas at my house meant fresh pine boughs wrapped around the banister with velvet ribbon, candles in every window, and homemade dinners for 20 cooked by Mom. When I lost Mom at 23, Christmas became unbearable… until a new perspective helped me find peace.
This essay was the cover story in the 2020 Holiday Issue of Reader’s Digest.
“You don’t know me, or I you, but I’ve worn Edwin Pearce’s name around my wrist for many years.”
Front page of the Boston Globe on 11/11/20, featured in print in Boston Globe Magazine on Sunday, 11/15/20.
The 1875 Page Act was one of the earliest pieces of federal legislation to restrict immigration to the United States.
I was reading old family letters in bed when it slipped out of an envelope and into my lap: the aluminum dog tag that had hung around my uncle Jack’s neck in 1972, the year he disappeared during the CIA-led “Secret War” in Laos.
For Literary Hub
Tours may be cancelled. Libraries may have closed their doors, and brownstone stoops may have less free piles for the taking. But at the end of these long quarantine days, I have been logging into Zoom and Instagram Live and watching authors share stories. I’m slated to read at digital festivals as far away as Amsterdam and Australia. In our sleepless present, we have the incredible opportunity to read to one another out loud from within the walls of our homes, all of us waiting out the future together.
I thought it was strange but delightful that Ravi was always in the office kitchen when I was. Ravi later confessed that he knew when it was time to snack because he would listen for Lola's jingling collar accompanying my every move.
For Vogue
The U.S. bombing of Laos (1964-1973) was part of a covert attempt by the CIA to wrest power from the communist Pathet Lao, a group allied with North Vietnam and the Soviet Union during the Vietnam War.
The officially neutral country became a battleground in the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union, with American bombers dropping over two million tons of cluster bombs over Laos—more than all the bombs dropped during WWII combined. Today, Laos is the most heavily bombed nation in history. Here are facts about the so-called secret war in Laos.
My mom’s lasting gift to her daughters, family and friends was making cancer something you could talk about.
American bombs, morbid memorabilia, and graphic photographs tell the story of the CIA-led “Secret War” from the Pathet Lao perspective.
For Atlas Obscura
Think about it: Aside from your phone, what’s one other thing you use every single day?
Still stuck? We’ll give you a hint: 84 million rolls of it are manufactured daily, and the average person goes through 100 rolls a year.
This SEO-rich post was written to drive traffic to Boxed’s best-selling private label toilet paper. It rocketed to the #1 page in search results and brought in over $90,000 in revenue.
