November 2015
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
I’m also very thankful for tardigrades. Congratulations, coffee is good is for you again. Remembering the glory (holi)days of San Francisco’s Emporium. Maybe psychopaths like bitter food? Maybe a lot of things. I guess we’ve entered the days of appreciating…
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Do You Eat Pork?: Identity Politics in the Borderlands
The ethnic conflict wears me down. I am tired of being put in boxes, tired of explaining why I don’t fit. I sleep less and less.
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Integrating Your Experiments
For Electric Literature, novelist Noy Holland explores what it means to label (and often dismiss) writing as “experimental.” Holland notes the subjectivity and mess inherent in language and form, and why writing that aims for clarity might sacrifice authenticity in…
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Spelling Reformed
At The Awl, Annie Abrams gives the history of a 19th-century newspaper, Di Anglo-Sacsun, and its editors’ attempts to make literacy more available to the public, by developing their own phonetic alphabet that the newspaper was written in. Abrams also dives…
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Nobody’s Expert
The New York Times’s Alexandra Alter interviews “America’s foremost public intellectual” and National Book Award winner Ta-Nehisi Coates on his newfound success and public hail—which he both appreciates and is ambivalent about, it seems: The best part of writing is…
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Get to Know Benjamin Clementine
Who is Benjamin Clementine? It’s a fair question to ask, considering this relatively unfamiliar artist was recently awarded the Mercury Prize (the UK’s parallel to the Grammy’s “Album of the Year”) for his album At Least For Now. The London…
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What it Means to Remix
At Tor.com, Natalie Zutter looks at fandom’s remix culture through the lens of Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On novel, itself a remix of the Harry Potter series and countless Chosen One narratives.
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The New Yorker Novella
[T]he long short story/novella is a fantastic medium for story, one that is uniquely suited to the online platform. The New Yorker has begun a new online series, New Yorker Novella, to be comprised of novellas the magazine wasn’t “able to…
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A Dominant in Lust, Love, and Heartbreak
Being a dominant top in love means an ache—for someone to tend to, to take care of, to steer and supervise, to shape and to set free.
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Notable Los Angeles: 11/23–11/29
Monday 11/23: Phil Cousineau discusses and signs The Books of Roads: Travel Stories from Michigan to Marrakech. 7 p.m. at Book Soup. Alex Honnold discusses and signs Alone on the Wall. Presented by Vroman’s Bookstore. 7 p.m. at All Saint’s…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
In the Saturday Essay, Anna March takes an unflinching look at the historical film Suffragette, which attempts to portray the women who took part in the suffrage movement during the early 1900s. While the film does draw attention to feminist successes,…