Posts by author
Casey Dayan
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Of Bread and Circuses
The wonky-eyebrowed hero of Office Space ends up happily working as a manual laborer, after his company literally collapses. This embrace of working outdoors, with his hands, is supposed to counter the namby-pamby paper shuffling under fluorescent lights that defines…
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Glass Ceilings Lately
Last summer, NPR exposed the recent less-than-virtuous practices of major news publications in the U.S., which have been printing false bylines. With the advent of the Internet, it’s much more practical to outsource work to writers in countries without wage regulations.…
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Reading: Still Probably a Good Idea
We linked to an Atlantic article in January about the recent decline in readers in America. According to the article, 23 percent of Americans went without reading a single novel in 2013. Now, Time has a summary of a recent study of reading’s…
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Boo Radley, Social Media Star
Last Monday, Harper Lee brought an end to what CNN has called “a glaring holdout in the digital library of literary masterpieces,” and the news has social media buzzing with fans chomping at the bit. Lee has finally agreed to…
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The Girl with the Hair in Her Mouth
“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness: those moments when another human being was there in front of me, suffering, and I responded sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly,” George Saunders said in his 2013 commencement address at Syracuse.…
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Discussion Nostalgia, Book Clubbing
Up on your wall behind your office desk is a small sheet of paper, gold-leaf embossed, an emblem in the bottom right hand corner—it reads: The University of Something-or-Rather in authoritative print. But is the paper just filling space? You…
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Insert Short Story Here
[Beginning in media res in mother’s house.] [Sufficiently dramatic exposition with an obvious, planted echo to the story’s climax.] Story in need of kindling? Take a gander at this short story template from McSweeney’s. Use it as a guide— —Ok.…
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Where Betty Byrne Lived
Story is an integral part of the city of Dublin. Bronze statues of beloved writers roam the landscape, immortal: Wilde lounges “languidly on a crag in the park at Merrion Square,” while Joyce is “depicted rather more severely in bronze, leaning on his cane…
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Please, Sir, I Want Some More
Designer, director, and “amateur table-setter” Dinah Fried has recreated a number of iconic meals from famous fiction: tequila, grapefruits, and cigarettes from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; the bowl of chowder from Moby Dick; the cheese sandwich from Catcher in the…
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Love to Gabo
Gabriel Garcia Marquez died yesterday at home in Mexico City. 87 years since his birth in Aracataca, CO, “Gabo” Marquez has written over twenty novels and short story collections. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and may have been…
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Social Media Year, 2080
In the spirit of Orwell, Saunders, and M.T. Anderson, see here for a glimpse at the future of social media: virtual reality dates, sensory augmentation, robots writing on humans in peer-reviewed journals. Sensory augmentations will make possible ever-deeper transports…
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The American Financial System in Story
Take a look at this review of Michael Lewis’s Flash Boys over at The Millions. There’s something endearing about Lewis’s project to unmask and reveal: The task Lewis sets for himself in Flash Boys is to pry the American financial system loose…