Posts by author
Roxie Pell
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Chomsky For You
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 the case for Chomsky’s continuing relevance: Regardless of how one…
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You Write or You Don’t
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 dreamier MFA becomes, but there’s a practical you inside you…
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Second Time’s the Charm
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 years. Novelists Yiyun Li and Colson Whitehead will be judging…
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What’s Changed
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 is to feminism. She’s the missing link in a chain…
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Love and Hate
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 the fear of losing someone she depends on: Reading online…
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You Are What You Review On Yelp
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 has been confirmed in dozens of languages and cultures, and…
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On the Road Again
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.
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Getting in Line
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 medium in its intended form.
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Writers for Choice
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 fundraising event called The Choice Auction. The group, which included…
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What Dreams May Come
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 fiction—fall so low on our priority list: But in the…
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Grandma Loved It
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 her collaboration on an album that mixes her poetry with…
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Rewriting History
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 which the American master narrative has written slavery out of…