Nobody Likes Mansfield Park
You think your mom was a harsh critic? Slate published an excerpt of criticism about Mansfield Park from Jane Austen’s friends and family. Austen compiled the criticism in an 8-page…
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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.
Weekly Geekery
Do video games undermine empathy? Or are they just a comfortable scapegoat for a violent culture? Scientists search for an evolutionary reason for art. Spoiler alert: The answer is men…
The Sins of the Father
Lord Byron’s estranged daughter, Lady Ada Lovelace, was just as swashbuckling and as tragic as her father. She was also a card shark, drug addict, and computer genius.
Believing in Small Things
As if making meaning wasn’t the purpose of writing fiction; as if the point of archaeology was to display objects in a glass case, and not to learn about the…
Weekly Geekery
It’s time to shut down the comments section. And all the writers around the world rejoice. Jerkology 101: The science of sorting out your social life. E-books you can fold.…
The Stories that Remain
Slender Man and the Hunger Games salute have crossed the boundaries from the fictional world to the real world. Begging the questions, what are the stories that remain with us?…
On Writing the Personal Struggle
For me, the act of writing is all about getting rid of self-criticism, and at the same time I have an almost religious belief in literature. These two kingdoms are…
Weekly Geekery
Albert Einstein: When science and celebrity, story and physics collide. Social media isn’t taking over book time, social media is taking over TV time, and that’s okay. The science of capturing…
On Homosexuality and Wrestling with a Faith that Doesn’t Want You
In Chelsea Station magazine, Brian Bouldrey writes about editing Wrestling with the Angel: Faith and Religion in the Lives of Gay Men, and about how he’s still wrestling with faith…
Resurrecting a Monster
Forty-one years after his death, JRR Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf has been published by his son Christopher. Tolkien translated Beowulf early in his career, yet never published it. In the…
The Jewish Little House on the Prairie
Sydney Taylor’s beloved children’s classic All-of-a-Kind Family is being resurrected by Lizzie Skurnick books. The series of books follows the lives of a Jewish family of four girls and their…
Weekly Geekery
Keats said truth is beauty, but science disagrees. Changing technology means our writing is literally going to the crapper. Investigating the interaction between the mind and the outside world. Sussing…