Posts by author
Katie O’Brien
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Imperiled Across Both the Deep and Immediate Past
At the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates unflinchingly analyzes and condemns the history of mass incarceration in America and its disproportionately devastating effect on black families: The blacks incarcerated in this country are not like the majority of Americans. They do not…
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Making the Cut
In writing, what is not said can be just as important as what is. Over at the New Yorker, John McPhee discusses the art of choosing what to include and what to omit from a piece: Writing is selection. Just to…
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Plot and Prejudice
At Electric Literature, Matthew Salesses discusses the works of Joseph Conrad and Flannery O’Connor to explore the problem of unconscious prejudice and unintentional racism in writing, and how writers can avoid it: The writing of fiction cannot treat marginalized characters…
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(Don’t) Stick To What You Know
At the Atlantic, Angela Flournoy, author of The Turner House, discusses her struggle with writing about Detroit without having lived there, and how Zora Neale Hurston’s work helped her give herself permission to write outside her own experiences: It’s not…
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Use It in a Sentence
British designer Jez Burrows was looking up a word in the New Oxford American Dictionary and was struck by how literary the example sentences for word definitions were. So he created a new Tumblr called Dictionary Stories, where he posts…
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Refusal to Read
At Slate, Jacob Brogan responds to the Duke freshman who has made the headlines for speaking out on his refusal to read Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun Home, on the grounds that it is “pornographic”: Sex becomes pornographic when we…
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Novel Recipes
Blogger Cara Nicoletti has written a cookbook inspired by various works of literature. It’s called Voracious: A Hungry Reader Cooks Her Way through Great Books, and Nicoletti gives recipes for food from books like Nancy Drew, Gone Girl, To Kill…
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Belize’s Art Revolution
At Electric Literature, Monica Byrne discusses the ongoing art revolution in Belize, and how artists create works that represent a diverse and beautiful country dealing with the trauma of postcolonialism: If an artist isn’t interested in protest per se, how…
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Extensions of the Self
Over at Vela Magazine, Rachel Wilkinson explores the cultural significance of women’s hair: Feminists have often identified hair grooming as the first lesson in gender socialization. Dolls are perfectly designed to aid girls in learning submission, letting them play-act the…
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The Dilemma of Wartime Journalism
At Guernica, Richard Falk discusses journalism during the Vietnam War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how remaining ‘objective’ is actually being biased by turning a blind-eye to suffering: I came to realize that the journalistic ethos as applied to foreign…
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Fighting Age and Gender Bias in Screenwriting
Meryl Streep announced that she is funding The Writer’s Lab, a new program dedicated to supporting and mentoring female screenwriters over 40—directly in response to the gender and age bias against female writers. Twelve writers have been selected to attend…