Roxie Pell is a student at Wesleyan University, where she writes for Wesleying and The Argus and tweets hilarious nuggets of pure wisdom @jonathnfranzen.
Intellectual all-star and modern day renaissance man Noam Chomsky has finally released a “Best Of” anthology, to the elation of liberal arts students nationwide. At The Daily Beast, David Masciotra makes…
As if we weren’t already torn over MFA programs, Joseph Scapellato recounts their pros, cons, joys, uncertainties, and (of course) costs: MFA is dreamy, and the more MFA talks the…
Slate and the Whiting Foundation have teamed up to save authors from the dreaded sophomore slump in a quest to unearth the five best second novels of the last five…
Two years from now, Wonder Woman will appear in her first live action movie. But can a feminist superhero born in 1941 represent women’s issues in 2016? Wonder Woman’s debt…
Sometimes we can’t help but blame the people we need for making us need them. In an essay for the New York Times’s Modern Love column, Rumpus contributor Anna March writes about…
In an excerpt from his upcoming book, linguist Dan Jurafsky analyzes the metaphors we use to describe different kinds of food. Turns out humans are pretty optimistic: The Pollyanna effect…
What gives the road movie (or, more broadly, the epic voyage) its staying power across cultures and time is an intrinsic narrative structure with a built-in beginning and end in the form of a starting point and destination.
With its essential formatting and intricate detail, poetry initially faced difficulties adapting to a convenience-oriented digital market. Luckily, technological advances in e-book publishing have made it possible to preserve the…
When she realized her local Planned Parenthood was struggling to stay open, author and board member Lauren Groff recruited two-dozen other writers to auction off various literary swag in a…
In a culture where everything is assigned a market value, imagination isn’t in high demand. Over at The Millions, Chloe Benjamin wonders why some of imagination’s most vivid manifestations—dreams and…
As if we needed any more evidence that Maya Angelou was both a goddess of verse and the chill best friend you wish you had (sorry JLaw), Billboard has revealed…
Salon has published an excerpt from Edward E. Baptist’s new book about the relationship between slavery and the development of capitalism in America. In it, he identifies the ways in…