Posts by author
Lyz Lenz
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Seeing What We Read
More banally we may stand at the luggage collection carousel watching endless bags tumble onto the belt. We hold in our minds a shadowy idea of our own bag. Then suddenly it is there and the effort of “visualizing” ceases.…
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Stalked by Eccentricities
Joyce Carol Oates talks about her new novel, inspired by her stalker: Stephen King is a friendly acquaintance. He has been a very generous individual in the world of genre fiction, and of fiction generally. But more particularly, King was…
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Weekly Geekery
Are you a science dummy? Do you need to be happy? There is an app for that. The science of your face. Algorithms don’t know best. The history of Silicon Valley.
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Trolloping through Modern Life
Adam Gopnik on Anthony Trollope and his relevance to modern life: Trollope, quite uncynically, understands both what’s necessary to make the world go round and which way the world ought to be made to turn. The Palliser books have a…
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Franzen Continues…
Wait, he’s not done yet. Franzen talks birds, climate change, and religion with Salon: I think more broadly, there has been a general trend in the environmental movement over the last couple of decades to try to learn to speak…
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Weekly Geekery
What we need is a kinder, gentler robot. The currency of clicks. Using Google to find a monster. Shedding your own skin. Thinking beyond extinction.
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A Wrinkle in the Wrinkle
The Wall Street Journal has an article that questions the traditional interpretations of A Wrinkle in Time: Ms. Voiklis said she wanted readers to know the book wasn’t a simple allegory of communism. Instead, it’s about the risk of any…
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Weekly Geekery
Examining continuity on screen and in our minds. How to constantly work without actually working. Buzzfeed is not so special after all. (So says the Atlantic.) Algorithms are to creativity in the 21st century as Gutenberg’s press was to creativity in…
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Annoying Authors
Writer Delilah Dawson on why self-promotion for authors is a bad idea: From the very beginning of my writing career, I’ve been told that publishers want a writer to have a brand, a platform, a blog, a built-in army of…
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Shaming Public Shaming
What makes this book an uncomfortable, if distant, cousin of GamerGate and men’s rights activist logic is that it, too, relies on a series of false equivalencies and muddy distinctions in order to elevate being shamed on social media to…
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Anatomy of a Motherfucker
Maria Popova collects the advice of Cheryl Strayed and uses Strayed’s words to deconstruct motherfuckery. Invoking the time right before she wrote her first book, when she too was a twenty-something writer plagued by the same fear that she was…
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Weekly Geekery
Space sex! The science of being twitterpated. iPads can’t fix everything. The religion of technology. Need to police the police? There’s an app for that.