The Jokes That Define Us
Vulture has a retrospective of 100 years of history-defining jokes. Like this one from The Producers: Springtime for Hitler, and Germany / Deutschland is happy and gay / We’re marching to…
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.
Hating Your Own Book Trailer
Slate is on the case, looking at why so many book trailers are self-loathing: Behold Jonathan Franzen, opening his book trailer for Freedom with the words: “This might be a…
All Perspectives Are Personal
Sarah Galo interviewed Molly Crabapple for Guernica. They talked about race, violence, innocence, and narrative voice: Lately, I haven’t been putting myself into my work that much, because I’ve just…
Weekly Geekery
Opening the doors of Silicon Valley’s male-dominated culture. The Internet’s deep rift. Facebook, but for trees. Remembering Dawkins.
Are Writers Too Safe?
Is a lack of economic stability making writers too safe? Maggie Doherty argues “yes”: Nearly half a century later, we find ourselves at a different sort of crisis point. Radical…
Reading Virginia Woolf Again
January 25 marked Virginia Woolf’s 134th birthday. Rachel Vorona Cote has this remembrance for Hazlitt: If we regard ourselves as the protagonists of our own lives, then we must, to live empathically,…
Weekly Geekery
Should you really follow your bliss? What is really behind Flint’s water crisis? Will Facebook become even more of a virtual reality? Novelists are the best at seeing inside the mind of…
Listening to Poets
Should poetry be heard and not seen? In most, though not all, historic literary traditions, verse is distinguished from prose by the fact that the lines or stanzas are identified…
Out, Out, Bill Clinton!
In her op-ed “Hillary in History,” published November 8, 2015, New York Times columnist Gail Collins notes that “when it comes to women winning political office, there’s a long line of…
Weekly Geekery
Should Facebook decide what qualifies as tragedy? How can technology shape stories beyond how they are displayed? Herzog on reality. Would our Founding Fathers approve of copyright law?
Buying Homemade Aprons and a Psychic
Claire Carusillo on the psychics of Etsy: Etsy has 8,694 results (and counting!) for “tarot reading,” 7,650 for “psychic reading,” and 945 for “astrology reading.” The Etsy psychic community conducts…
Mindless Clickers
Writing for Nautilus, Paul La Farge argues that it’s not the Internet’s fault we are mindless clickers: There’s no question that digital technology presents challenges to the reading brain, but,…