Maud Newton
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Vonnegut’s Nuclear Bow-tie
Twenty years before Slaughterhouse-Five, a broke Kurt Vonnegut came up with an idea for an atomic bow-tie. While he became known for his environmentalism later in life, in 1950, Vonnegut—like America at large—seemed ready to cash-in on the atomic. “By…
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Now We’re Talking
It’s not always oil that we spill into the ecosystem. Every now and then a pet cockatoo is let loose or escapes, joins a wild flock, and teaches the natives how to speak. The phenomenon accounts for “numerous” reports by…
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Deconstructing Debt
In this interview economic anthropologist David Graeber disputes the standard theory that the monetary system replaces the barter system, arguing that credit and debt come before money. Graeber sheds light on the complex relationship between debt and morality, transitions from…
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Maud Newton on a DFW-Inspired Trend
Maud Newton’s NY Times essay, “Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace,” discusses yet another DFW-inspired trend–that is his “slangy approachability.” He defined a writing style that has permeated through the blogosphere. His ability to combine legal…
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Dictionary For The Future
Lean Logic: A Dictionary For the Future and How To Survive It describes itself as “a community of essays about inventive, cooperative self-reliance in the face of great uncertainty.” Building upon that characterization, this review presents Lean Logic as a…
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The First ?
Does anyone else think the question mark is the most beautiful of all punctuation marks? Well, the very first question mark may have looked more like a colon. Discovered in Syriac manuscripts of the Bible from the fifth century, the…
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Writing Frenzies and their Social Effects
Maud Newton has some relatable writing pains that she’s been ruminating on. It can take forced isolation and sometimes jail time to produce tangible, significant results. This is the kind of isolation that can make the public realm difficult and…
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Does My Word Sound Big?
Have we been overlooking sound symbolism? Recent studies have shown that humans connect certain sounds with sensory perceptions and thus, the sound of a word could hint at its meaning. This article addresses how the idea fits into theories on…
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First Muses
Remember your first muse? “My first muse was a chubby, bespectacled, brown-eyed, sharply intelligent 13-year-old boy in Phoenix, Arizona in 1975. When he laughed at and loved my writing, I felt the erotic surge of my own power. Since then,…
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Orson Welles’ Nose
Orson Welles was self-conscious about the size of his nose, a small issue that lead to make-up malfunctions and a lot of prosthetics. You can track this compulsion of a legendary actor/director through the size of his nose in his…
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Reading in the New Year
Welcome to 2011! What do we call this decade, anyway? Who will win the Super Bowl? What will become of health care reform? How many New York City snowplows does it take to screw in a light bulb? Some questions…
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E.B. White’s Essays
“Some writers shame and immobilize me with their brilliance, while others, like Twain, de Vries and Spark dwarf my own efforts but inspire me to keep on. It’s hard to pinpoint what separates the two groups; if pressed I’d say…