Posts by author
Casey Dayan
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How to Read Online and Still Understand Things
This New Yorker article sums up some recent thinking on the psychological effects of online reading. There were the architects who wrote to her about students who relied so heavily on ready digital information that they were unprepared to address…
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DFW and his Big Alanis Morissette Poster. (Also, Robots.)
We recently linked to a till-then undiscovered interview with David Foster Wallace. See here for something on the music he loved.
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Feminism Today
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, editor and founder of Bookslut.com Jessa Crispin writes on feminism in its contemporary incarnation by way of two recent critiques of 50 Shades of Grey. She draws a distinction between feminism (a discourse) and…
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A Harder Job to Imagine
It’s true, this job seemed hard to trump—but there’s worse out there. Before the strike, platinum miners in South Africa made approximately $94.00 per month. The strike itself took 44 lives. Find here a timeline of the five month conflict.
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A Hard Job to Imagine
It’s sometimes hard to imagine the life of the road-tarer or the elephant waste remover. Here’s to an unsung hero the world wouldn’t be the same without. Point is, no matter how long I been doing this or how I…
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A Parable in the Desert
McSweeney’s gives us another weighty parable, “We Can Argue about What Makes Mirages after We Get out of the Desert.” Apply to ISIS, Ukraine, or forehead. Tim, it’s not that I don’t believe you watched a documentary on mirages, that’s not…
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Rent-a-Man
Find here at the New Yorker a short history of Ted Peckham, an entrepreneur in the first half of the last century known for his male escort service, indicted for the possibilities it opened up. The escort “would have to remain…
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Bee Killers Killing Bees
A week ago, we posted this, about shark proliferation. We also mentioned bees, which aren’t faring as well. Apparently, Wal Mart and Home Depot aren’t helping. See here for why.
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Excavated Heartbreaking Interview with David Foster Wallace
I didn’t really understand emotionally that there are people around who didn’t have enough to eat, who weren’t warm enough, who didn’t have a place to live, whose parents beat the hell out of them regularly. The sadness isn’t in…
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On the Particular Origins of Some Literary Cliches
The phrase “little did she/he/they know” has plenty of history. The question is, when did it start being used for cheap suspense? The inversion of subject and verb sounds stilted and melodramatic, so the obvious culprit would be 19th century…
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What a Relief, Still Tons of Sharks
If you take the bait, it’s pretty necessary that you imagine the Jaws theme while reading. Keep keeping an eye out for the bees—but sharks, it seems, may be doing just fine. At least great whites. New tech like Ocearch’s…
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Dear Son or Daughter
Here is the problem in writing letters to your kids—perhaps especially as a writer, who has arguably spent her entire professional life writing letters to everyone who isn’t her kids: How do you suddenly start writing in a grand literary…