Posts by author
Lyz Lenz
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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 document, which just shows that even successful novelists are insecure.
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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 and sex. How does widespread surveillance effect art and free…
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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.
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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 people who used them. In essay published in Cleaver Magazine,…
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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. Techy the Slate writer says, “Only you can prevent the…
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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? That we manifest into reality?
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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 impossible to unite. So what I do, apparently, is try…
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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 death in plaster. Google writes poetry to its computer. Is…
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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 and homosexuality: I realized that there were these others, these…
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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 New Yorker, Joan Acocella speculates on the reason: Another possible…
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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 brother living in pre-WWI New York. These are not only…
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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 out the Ur text of memes. What is the state…