Posts by author
Olivia Wetzel
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Oxford Dictionary of Emojis
For The Stranger, Rich Smith justifies Oxford Dictionaries’s choice for the UK’s Word of the Year: an emoji. Although OD has been getting backlash from critics lamenting “the death of language, the end of the world, etc.,” Smith claims that emojis are just…
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Year in Review
At The Morning News, prominent writers and thinkers discuss what they believe to be the most and least important events of the year. For example, Jazmine Hughes, associate digital editor of the New York Times Magazine, says: “The best and worst…
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Star Words
Ryan Britt provides a list of non-Star Wars books for Star Wars fans to read. The list includes books by authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, J.K. Rowling, and Carrie Fisher. Check these books out either before you see the new…
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Flashes of Reality
At The Fanzine, Lucy Tiven reviews Micah Ling’s recent collection of poems, Flashes of Life. She focuses on the use of song in Ling’s poems, and how it allows Ling to play with the dichotomy of reality and fantasy: I believe…
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Voldemort vs. Trump
J.K. Rowling has recently found herself defending her Harry Potter series’ character Voldemort against comparisons to Donald Trump. At Electric Literature, however, Julia Tolo points out the similarities between the two: As Harry Potter fans know, Voldemort’s motis operandi was hinged…
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A Conversation with Ivan Vladislavić
Tristan Foster interviews South African writer Ivan Vladislavić on the importance of art in his writing, having a large body of work, and the appeal (or lack of appeal) of cities: Our love for cities is always unrequited. Johannesburg is not…
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Noelle Kocot’s Favorite Things
Author Noelle Kocot shares with us five things/people/places that interest her right now, like supermarket fliers and Michael Foucault: I am also very interested in the writings of Michel Foucault—I don’t think he is crazy at all, and I think…
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City and Sustenance
At Hazlitt, novelist Orhan Pamuk discusses the influence of food and food vendors on his latest work, the ritual of drinking boza, and the inspiration that the city of Istanbul provides: I walk in the city all the time. It’s…
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Spelling Reformed
At The Awl, Annie Abrams gives the history of a 19th-century newspaper, Di Anglo-Sacsun, and its editors’ attempts to make literacy more available to the public, by developing their own phonetic alphabet that the newspaper was written in. Abrams also dives…
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Student and Teacher, Man and God
At the Paris Review, H.S. Cross analyzes Ernest Raymond’s 1922 novel, Tell England. He explores the unique and charged relationships between a schoolteacher, Radley, and his students, Ray and Doe. The boys have an unexpected and, at least initially, seemingly erotic reverence…