Weekly Geekery
Amanda Marcotte isn’t listening to you on Twitter anymore. You can run, you can hide, but you can’t escape the modern office. Unfettered access to technology isn’t always good for…
Posts by author
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.
Dark Life Begets Dark Tales
The Airship Daily examines the life of Horacio Quiroga. In his work, Quiroga shows a morbid obsession with death and violence (see: “The Decapitated Chicken”), and a large part of…
The Anatomy of Funny
McGraw’s studies have led him to endorse something called the benign-violation theory, which holds that “humor only occurs when something seems wrong, unsettling, or threatening (i.e., a violation), but simultaneously…
Weekly Geekery
The marriage of metaphor and your mind. Coming to terms with Nothingness. The revealing science of word choice. Time-lapse video and how we document the world around us. The words…
Friends Don’t Let Friends Write Drunk
The Airship Daily contemplates the relationship between writing and booze. What is it about intoxication that makes us believe we are better at things than we actually are? Wittier, funnier…
The Internet Hates Female Writers
More than 5 percent of the messages a woman receives online will be abusive or derogatory in nature, on average. Piers Morgan, whom researchers rank as the No. 1 receiver…
Weekly Geekery
Video game anti-heros. Technology is making everything beautiful. One way technology is making everything awesome (as discussed above): A video of deans losing their cool. Another opinion: Get technology out…
The Science of Why You Can’t Read Good Literature
Writer Michael Harris discusses digital distraction and reading War and Peace at Salon: But there’s a religious certainty required in order to devote yourself to one thing while cutting off…
Letting the Story Surprise You
As part of their series on the craft of non-fiction and the personal essay, Michael Steinberg discusses the struggles and surprises of writing his memoir in the Tri-Quarterly Review. As…
Weekly Geekery
Social media, journalism, Ferguson, and challenging power. The Internet cannot have nice things. We’re all horses. So, where’s our Black Beauty? The nature of creativity. You guys, you guys, Buzzfeed isn’t…
The Theory of Trickle-Up Literacy
One does not pass from lower to higher. On the contrary one might perfectly well fall from the higher to the lower, or simply read both, as many people eat…
What Is the Cost of a Story?
Author Chuck Wendig ponders the true cost of an e-book: Maybe the question really isn’t “what’s an e-book worth?” Maybe instead we should ask: What is a story worth? Maybe that’s…