Posts by author
Lyz Lenz
-
Sylvia Plath and Race
Why Plath? People are surprised or disappointed or embarrassed when I automatically cite her as one of my writing influences, one of my life influences. I think it’s because of the stigma of suicide and ingrained bias. She’s a polarizing…
-
Who Digitizes the Books?
Of course books don’t digitize themselves. Human hands have to individually scan the books, to open the covers and flip the pages. But when Google promotes its project—a database of “millions of books from libraries and publishers worldwide”—they put the…
-
Weekly Geekery
The Internet will not save creators. Are you tired of reading about how Amazon is the Devil, yet? Good. Space Ship Two and Sir Walter Raleigh. Your refrigerator is freaking me out. Cory Doctorow explains art and the Internet to…
-
Studying Salinger
The argument for JD Saliger’s writing. This leaves one wondering: just when was Salinger great? Presumably, only in Catcher; the rest is just a means of cheering himself up. With his typical portentous certitude, Shields concludes the book: “He came…
-
Why Didion Remains
We like to think of Joan Didion as glamorous, the sunglasses-wearing, VOGUE-working, New York loving-and-leaving writer that we all could have been if only life had turned out a little differently. We imagine her sitting down to edit with a…
-
The Operating System for Grief
I was handed that toy, sitting on Tom’s porch, in 1992. A person offering another person a piece of advice. Life passed through that object as well, through the teddy bear as much as through the operating systems of yore.…
-
Weekly Geekery
The final frontier of stories. What the government did with content will shock and delight you. The science of your confident stupidity. Twitfic is just getting started. Slate hosted a talk about Amazon, books, literature and the future. Here is…
-
Crashing on Ice
The sound you hear when you put ice cubes into warm (but not hot) water—that subtle but quick crackling—is the sound all around you in the summer fjords near glaciers. There is ice everywhere in the water, the size of…
-
If It’s Not One Thing, It’s A Mother
My mother stood before me in her quilted bathrobe, dark hair held back in a ponytail, her eyes sunken, grey. I felt like the narrator of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, who, startled out of sleep, opens his eyes to behold the…
-
Reviving Tongva
Pamela Munro on reviving a language no one speaks: It’s hard to find information on Tongva. There are no audio recordings of people speaking the language, just a few scratchy wax cylinder recordings of Tongva songs. There are additional word…
-
Weekly Geekery
If you are a white man, your Internet is different than other internets. Hackers are going offline and embracing print. Content moderators keep your Internet from being worse. A comprehensive history of the reviled banner ad. Facebook is changing journalism.…
-
Marilyn Robinson’s Glorious Bill Moyers Interview
It is pretty great. Yes. It’s impossible to achieve things like justice if you don’t have enough compassionate imagination for any other human being to understand that they deserve justice. That shorthand justice is not the thing at all. You…