The Pause That Does Not Refresh
You hear a lot about hot flashes, but hot flashes are the least of it, totally inconsequential in every way: you get as hot as a steam iron at odd…
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Lyz Lenz
351 posts
Lyz's writing has been published in the New York Times Motherlode, Jezebel, Aeon, Pacific Standard, and others. Her book on midwestern churches is forthcoming from Indiana University Press. She has her MFA from Lesley and skulks about on Twitter @lyzl. Lyz is a member of The Rumpus Advisory Board and a full-time staff writer for the Columbia Journalism Review.
Weekly Geekery
Mars: The ultimate back up planet. Goodbye, ladyblogging. How does social media walk the line between enabling hate speech and not giving it a megaphone. The Kindle cannot kill the…
We’d All Be Better Off With Napoleon
On the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo, Andrew Roberts argues that we’d all be better off with a little more Napoleon: A vast amount of literature has explored why…
Atwood’s Magical Slumbering Book
“There’s something magical about it,” says Atwood. “It’s like Sleeping Beauty. The texts are going to slumber for 100 years and then they’ll wake up, come to life again. It’s…
Weekly Geekery
Your new lesson plan: Be smarter than a computer. John Henry. But instead of a railroad, it’s a computer. And instead of John Henry, it’s NPR’s Scott Horsley. Your stories may not…
Delivering Whisky After An Earthquake
As I worked, filing reports every night from a hotel room, the details nagged at me. Her mother, Japa Tamang, was living in an open-sided shed once used to store…
Vivian Gornick Does Not Like Your MFA
Jessica Gross interviewed Vivian Gornick for Longreads and they talked money, death, sex, MFAs, and other things that bore Gornick: It’s meaningless to me. I found, as the years went on, I…
Weekly Geekery
Grumbling about technology. Reddit users can report harassment. Will it help? The New York Times and Buzzfeed published directly to Facebook, just like your mom. Is technology destroying men? Pooping in…
My Sister’s Legs
Because that’s how it is with sisters. You are them. You are not them. You are broken shards from the same pane of glass, each reflecting a different light.
The Light of Sally Man
The Daily Beast interviews photographer Sally Mann about her new memoir and the overlap between writing and photography: Yes. They’re so fleeting but in both there is that raptus of…
Which Direction?
Tonight the mass of girls before me in the arena, swarming like insects, raises a question of economy. How many waitressing shifts, humid summer jobs, and hours babysitting does it…
Weekly Geekery
Portrait of a lady serial killer. Can Silicon Valley save our schools? Talking to women on the Internet is hard work. The Apple of Prisons? And that isn’t even the…