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Lyz Lenz

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.
  • Lyz Lenz

    The Best Job You’ll Get With That Degree

    Young, rich, Ivy League-educated and unemployed? Francesca Mari has the job for you. When I was an undergrad at Harvard, the English department produced fancy brochures about the opportunities available to its majors: teacher, editor, Rhodes scholar. Personal assistant was…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Weekly Geekery

    Should writers blog? A unified theory of email. TLDR version: There isn’t one. They aren’t bots. They are people. And they have access to your private information. It is necessary for some scientists to abandon the passive voice. Is Internet culture…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Scaly Tales

    Joseph Hernandez writes about family and fish in a lovely bit of short fiction for The Offing magazine.

  • Lyz Lenz

    Rolling in Carrion

    Colin Dickey writes about death and its metaphors. Our dog has an insatiable curiosity and a love of these dead things. The time he dove into the wreck of a carcass that I could not even identify was the most…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Weekly Geekery

    Virtual reality is the final frontier. How to talk to aliens. Do livestreaming apps change the news? Ellen Pao and the media and Silicon Valley and Twitter and sexism and everything. Is virtual medicine real medicine? Facebook is hungry. So.…

  • Lyz Lenz

    The Moments in the Middle

    Paul Lisicky writes about those moments in our lives when we find ourselves in between: Some people carve X’s into the skin behind their knees after a breakup. Some curse at random strangers, or fall in love with escorts or…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Well, How Does She Do It?

    So where does this leave us? I think back to “The Woman Question.” I have (most days) not felt the need to leave my husband and children in order to safeguard my sanity, so that is progress of a sort,…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Weekly Geekery

    Shame. The Internet. Monica Lewinsky. You spend hours killing people, but you don’t feel guilty. So much data. So few uses. All your stories in one little app. Reimagining incarceration. Your annoying Facebook friends have something to tell you.

  • Lyz Lenz

    Inherited Fear

    Perhaps I never was a brave person, but I know that I was bolstered by the fact that if something didn’t bother my mom, I didn’t need to be bothered by it either. Now, our anxieties have bubbled up at…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Fragility of Antiquity

    Adam Flemming Petty writes over on Electric Literature about the literature of ruins: This perception of antiquities as fragile rather than permanent, and all the more affecting for their fragility, is common in literature. Writers have often found their imaginations…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Weekly Geekery

    The Apple watch says you aren’t good enough. The tension between sex and science. Are rage clicks a thing of the past? What the Internet needs is a vigilante. Schools still have an equal access problem. When it comes to…

  • Lyz Lenz

    BFFs in Elena Ferrante Novels

    The literary idea that friends’ lives represent unmade choices, roads not taken, is applicable across gender and genre. Naturally, however, it has a particular resonance for women, because so many of life’s choices have particular resonance for women. Whether in…