Posts by author
Jeannie Yoon
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Women’s (Invisible) Work
A sharp appraisal of the myriad forms of unpaid emotional labor that women do in our world by Jess Zimmerman, over at The Toast: Imagine a menu of emotional labor: Acknowledge your thirsty posturing, $50. Pretend to find you fascinating, $100.…
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By the Light of the Maybe Moon Landing
If someone asked to me to sum up what is great about my country, I would probably tell them about Apollo 11, about the four hundred thousand people who worked to make the impossible come true within eight years, about…
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Handwriting is Dead; Long Live Handwriting
Type is the same, instance after instance, and the font you choose today will look the same when you type in it again tomorrow. The same is not true for crafting prose or poetry by hand, each looping connection between…
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Fan Fiction, Feedback Loops, and Literary Leakage
The New Inquiry has a smart analysis of fan fiction that examines its workings as a literary genre and as a form of reorienting, affecting, and queering a text: It announces a relationship to a source text that is infatuated, made dizzy,…
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A Literary Chorus: Communities On Twitter
I have heard writers take a stand that they are above Twitter and Instagram, superior for not participating in social media. It’s true the self-promotion feels inauthentic and tacky, but it can be brave to participate in the conversation with…
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Figure Drawing, Or, The Posthumous Persona Of David Foster Wallace
On the eve of a new biopic and on the long tail of posthumous publishing and popularization—Christian Lorentzen takes a long, compassionate, critical look at David Foster Wallace and on the ways in which a prolific writer gets written into the public…
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Why We Should (Still) Read (More) Translations
We here in the US are shitty. Also the rest of the world is shitty. Reading books in translation reminds us of this. The rest of the world is as shitty as we are, only it’s a different kind of…
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Claudia Rankine and #BlackLivesMatter
The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings. Consequently, our laws and attitudes have been straining against the devaluation of the black body. Despite good intentions, the associations of blackness with inarticulate, bestial criminality…
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The Srs Bsns of Writing Wryly
Sarcasm on the Internet—you know it when you see it. But how? Without the conversational aids of our best deadpan voices or our fingers as scare quotes, we use all sorts of tricks and mechanics. At The Toast, a linguist…
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Preserving Poetic Packaging
Remember the literary packaging that Jonathan Safran Foer developed with Chipotle? Well, someone at Yale has decided it’s worth holding onto—the Beinecke Rare Book Library will soon add a complete set of the cups and carry-out bags printed with the…
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Getting Write With Yourself
Do you need to be right with yourself in order to write best? Is it a matter of ego or an issue of the industry? Two views on the relevance of self-loathing to writing creatively in the New York Times.
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Toward A More Colorful Masthead
A new, work-in-progress database of contemporary writers of color created by Durga Chew-Bose, Jazmine Hughes, Vijith Assar, and Buster Bylander aims “to create more visibility for writers of color, ease their access to publications, and build a platform that is both…