Posts by author
Casey Dayan
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The Writer in the Science Family
As the media expert at home, I’ve often dictated what movies and TV shows we should watch. That has sometimes meant I’ve been awful to watch anything with. “This show is so racist,” I’d say while watching something with family.…
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A Play on a Painting
Take a trip to the Los Angeles Review of Books to find out how Chagall inspired the longest-running show on Broadway.
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Required Ideology in College Admissions
The Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology has added a new test to their admissions process. Prospective students are more likely to be admitted to the school if they prove that they are “confident” that they can “control” their own fates: Students…
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More Flarf
In September, we mentioned Dan Piepenbring’s essay on the artfulness of the Paris Review’s junk mail. Head to 3:AM Magazine for some more randomly-generated poetry, Michael Naghten Shanks’s Selected Spam Haikus, like this one: pull wealth out of your deep brown beans when they invite…
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If We Don’t Tell Our Stories, We Become Sick
I’ve always been writing about the same thing: that truth and stories are inextricably linked, that stories are truer than fact because they are fact organized into meaning. If we don’t tell our stories, if we don’t remember, and if…
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The Efficacy of Words
The truth is that the horror of being eaten outpaces the horror of death by any other means. Microbe, animal, another human: being consumed feels sharper, entirely visceral. But why? Over at Guernica, Lance Richardson writes on Peter Gorman’s Ayahuasca…
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On Social Capital and Staying Hidden
Meander to Hazlitt for Linda Besner’s recent reading of Alfred Hermida’s Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why it Matters. Besner’s critique is particularly concerned with the role of anonymity in a new, social-media-dominated landscape: Social media, in other words,…
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The Oregon Trail, Gen Two
Caulk your wagon. One of your oxen has died. You are only able to carry 200 pounds of meat. You have died of dysentery. Press spacebar to continue. Compared to the hurly-burly fantasia of contemporary video games, the pixilated challenges…
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Amis, Oates, and the Foul-Smelling Meadow
Recent [WWII] novels by Susanna Moore and Ayelet Waldman achieve their emotional power by focussing upon characters peripheral to the terrible European history that has nonetheless altered their lives. The conflagration must be glimpsed indirectly, following Appelfeld’s admonition that “one…
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Writing Tomorrow Better
Find yourself at the New York Times for Nick Bilton’s most recent article, a piece on the ways in which the sci-fi of the past has affected our real-life present. Moreover, Bilton highlights a recently formed group of writers, aware…
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Little Jack’s Love Letters
I shall worship her with quiet dignity. I shall draw her attention to me by exploits, success, and possibly a small measure of fame,” wrote a young, romantically inclined Jack Kerouac to a friend in one of a cache of…
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Struggling Writer, The Game
The Los Angeles Times surveyed over 200 writers, asked them how they got to where they are, assembled the pieces, and made this.