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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 Trouble with Pronouns

    I would never have consented to writing the story using a gendered pronoun for Sasha, but when that approach was rejected, writing without using pronouns at all seemed like a good solution. It was challenging to write that way without…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Weekly Geekery

    Forcing logic on the world. You are probably distracted right now. One of us. One of us. One of us. The dark side of the Internet. Margaret Atwood on the future. Stop calling them robots. The machines that write your…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Female Friendships in Fiction

    Jezebel is running a series on female friendships in fiction, starting with a look at the relationship between Daria Morgendorffer and Jane Lane.

  • Lyz Lenz

    Harper Schmarper, It’s Kundera We Want

    Sure, everyone is jazzed about the new Harper Lee book (except for those of us who are worried). But here is a book we can all get behind—a new Milan Kundera novel to be translated to English this summer: Faber described…

  • Lyz Lenz

    The Kill Fee is Killing Us All

    Journalist Scott Carney wants to kill the kill fee: When I came back to America I sent the best draft of the piece I could to my editor. He didn’t like it. So I rewrote it. He wanted stronger anecdotes,…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Weekly Geekery

    Dear future me, it’s past me. The blogs won. Seeing stories in color. A story of how two people met and fell in love in the 21st Century. TV in your public space.

  • Lyz Lenz

    The Real Problem with Campus Rape

    Fraternities do not have a monopoly on rapists: not at UVA, not at any frat, not even the deep Southern ones where upwards of 100 guys live in the house. (The plumbing; one shudders.) But: what the fraternity system does…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Meme-Control

    Don’t discount the power of memes to control minds. The National Post reports: Feminist Ryan Gosling is an “image macro,” a photo superimposed with text to humourous effect — and frequently employed for political ends. The ultimate takeaway from the…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Weekly Geekery

    How one troll came to repent for his sins. Speaking of trolls, they probably all have bad hearts. There is real symbiosis between science and fiction. There is also symbiosis between medicine and literature. Why we shouldn’t fetishize “makers.” Awkward online?…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Reading Playboy for the Stories

    Remembering Alice K. Turner, the fiction editor at Playboy magazine for two decades.

  • Lyz Lenz

    The Man Who Brings Us France

    A profile on Arthur Goldhammer, who has translated over 100 books from French to English. As a translator, Goldhammer tries to find a pragmatic middle-ground between literalism and freestyle. The goal is to be faithful to the contents of a…

  • Lyz Lenz

    Weekly Geekery

    Margaret Atwood only tweets 10 minutes a day. What is the true cost of caring? Crowdsourcing is not the brave new world we imagined. Can funny tweets change the world? The Internet isn’t forever. But can it be? “The Netflix…