Posts by author
Lyz Lenz
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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 a faster pace / Look out, here comes the master…
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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 good place for me to register my profound discomfort at…
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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 found the stories of the people I’m talking to much…
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Weekly Geekery
Opening the doors of Silicon Valley’s male-dominated culture. The Internet’s deep rift. Facebook, but for trees. Remembering Dawkins.
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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 literary experimentation continues, but it has become the privilege of…
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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, remember that we are not singular in our possession of…
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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 a terrorist.
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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 as such by recurrent patterns of sound (quantity, accent, rhyme,…
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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 wives in the cast of characters.” She calls Clinton a…
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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?
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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 its business digitally, sending results over email, video chat, or…
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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, seen from a historical perspective, these look like differences of…