The House of Wigs
“The diary of a copywriter, written on company time, billed to the client.” The House of Wigs is a small collection of sixty admirable short stories from the folks at…
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M. Rebekah Otto
67 posts
M. Rebekah Otto lives in Berkeley, CA. She grew up in Chicago. Her current interests include her new nine-to-five, vintage wallpaper, and Evan S. Connell. Also, she's the former Books Editor of the Rumpus.
Pimp This Bum
As Amazon, eBay, and the 2008 Presidential election demonstrated, the Internet is a great revenue stream. Well, two guys out of Houston (Sean and Kevin Dolan) decided to harness its…
The Garden of Eden
Pretty quietly back in 1994 archaeologists found huge stone carvings buried in Turkey. About the size of the boulders at Stonehenge, these unique rocks are more than 10,000 year older…
Eliza Doolittle in the White House
In her essay “Speaking in Tongues” in The New York Review of Books, February 26, 2009, Zadie Smith examines Barack Obama’s doubleness, not just his biracial genetic history but how…
I Hate to Make My Bed
In A Jury of Her Peers, Elaine Showalter chronicles the history of female American writers, from captivity narratives to Annie Proulx. Salon calls her “the woman for the job” due…
Save the Words
Though once upon a time Noah Webster wrote a dictionary to reflect the ever growing and changing language of American English, the Oxford English Dictionary does regularly update their logs…
The Last Book Party
So, where is the publishing industry going? No one really knows. But we like to speculate. For the March issue of Harper’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus covered the annual Frankfurt Book Fair,…
J.G. Ballard’s Pre-posthumous Memoir
After eighteen novels and even more short story collections, J. G. Ballard directly approaches autobiography in his latest book Miracles of Life. (Read the London Guardian review here.) Though known…
You Never Knew It Could Be Like This
Koert van Mensvoort is transforming the Internet and the culture around it. A Dutch artist and professor, Mensvoort challenges how we experience the world around us, especially, but not only,…
Reading Online
Fact: The Internet changes how we read. But is reading on the internet not really “reading” at all? In a recent column in The New York Times Virginia Heffernan analyzes…
Private Sector Detention
Last week Pennsylvania judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. plead guilty to illegally prosecuting minors, in order to get kickbacks from privately-run juvenile detention centers. Children were sentenced to three months incarceration for…
More Rules of Writing
In 2001, Elmore Leonard, famous for his crime fiction and suspense thrillers, wrote a spicy essay for The New York Times cataloging his suggestions for good writing, or, rather, he…