Obeying the Gods of Small Things
If the ephemeral objects were not collected, and if the journalistic, social-science reports not commissioned, and if all of it were not preserved, then no one would believe that such…
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.
Telling Digital Stories in the Classroom
A communications law professor offers this tale of integrating digital storytelling in the classroom: After all, we tell our students in courses focusing on skills that online tools are excellent…
Weekly Geekery
As if you needed another reason to hate the Internet. Here you go, Luddite. Can a monkey own a picture? Wikipedia thinks so. Need to measure your soul? There is…
Seeing Literature
In the New Yorker, Peter Mendelsund talks about designing book covers for iconic works of literature. The thing that surprised me was how dogmatic people were. They felt that when…
Being Plagued
In a quest for meaning, NPR compares the Ebola epidemic to Albert Camus’s The Plague. The Plague doesn’t have a happy ending, of course, though it’s not quite as hopeless as…
The Syphilis Code
A deep meditation on whatever it was that plagued James Joyce. For some, the uncertainty surrounding Joyce’s condition has turned the issue into his most captivating puzzle. Erik Schneider, an independent…
Weekly Geekery
THIS. THIIIISSSSS. And this history of “This.” Can Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) save the crumbling ivory towers of higher education? “Tech companies, in their many guises, always tell stories…
Monkeys Don’t Have Stories
The question, “why fiction?” has very much been on my mind lately, and it’s one of these things that, again, is so big, and so obvious that most people just…
So, You Want to Be a Great Writer?
Well, then. If you want to be a great writer, here is what you have to do. Some walked to get away from work, to clear the mind of words…
Weekly Geekery
Examining the troubled origins of our search for technological utopia. Autocorrect is our favorite fall guy for texting errors, but it’s also the reason you can text. What is worth…
You Have a Problem
Did you know that owning 1,000 books or more means you have a problem? We’re all in trouble. Rachel Kramer Brussel explains at The Toast: Books were far and away…
The Brontes Get Failing Marks
It’s no surprise from how the Bronte sisters wrote about school in their novels that their school reports would be less than exemplary. Still, to read Charlotte Bronte’s school report…