Posts by author
Stephanie Bento
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Mapping the Brain
Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley published a new study about brain activity in people listening to podcasts, the New York Times reported. “Using novel computational methods, the group broke down the stories into units of meaning: social elements,…
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Recollections of Home
The woman looked at me when she finished reading, smiling, expecting me to compliment her English. But I couldn’t speak, moved beyond words by a sense of homecoming in this place so far from home. Over at Travel + Leisure,…
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The Future of Hip-Hop
The rap golden age of the ’90s may be over, but rappers today are achieving a kind of mainstream cultural influence that would’ve been hard to imagine twenty years ago. Over at The Walrus, Simon Lewsen writes about Canadian rapper Drake,…
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Poetics on the Radio
This is where poetry approaches music. Because you cannot put meaning in words as intellectually comprehensible. It’s just there, and you know it’s there. And it is the rhythm and the beat and the music of the sound that carries…
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Writers: Be Bold!
To risk something real as a writer is to risk making a fool of oneself. … It is a difficult joy to risk something new as a writer. But it is a joy nonetheless. Author and translator Idra Novey knows…
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Whose Workshop Is It?
Here’s what I mean by not centering the author of the workshop piece: I always tell my students, following the lead of my favorite MFA professor, that the truth is that workshop is most helpful to the person talking, not…
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Words and Music
Over at Mother Jones, graphic designer Christophe Gowans reimagines classic rock albums as book covers. He says: “I got to thinking, well, what would those records look like if they actually were books, if the name of the album was actually the…
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Illuminating Poetry
Because Holzer now thinks of herself mostly as a reader, rather than a writer, she is happiest reimagining space with light, color, and form suffusing it, while a powerful beam is projecting poetry into the night—poetry with all its paradoxes,…
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Creative Writers in Conversation
Over at The Towner, Amelia Gray talks to Catherine Lacey about the role of the self and place in fiction, the artist’s responsibility to culture, and creativity and productivity. Lacey says: “It’s our job, as awake humans, not just as writers,…
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Serendipity in Life and Literature
Be unpredictable, including to yourself. So there’s the question of how do you go about finding things—or better their finding you? You have to be open to surprise and at the same time assiduous in pursuing the things you are…
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The Heroine’s Journey
What do Jane Eyre, Catherine Linton, and Katniss Everdeen have in common? “They can’t be pinned down. They are dazzlingly complex,” says Samantha Ellis, author of How to Be a Heroine, over at the BBC. Great heroines are fiercely passionate, Ellis…
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A Window to the World
Over at the New York Times Magazine, book critic and author Sam Anderson makes a compelling case for staring out windows: Windows are, in this sense, a powerful existential tool: a patch of the world, arbitrarily framed, from which we are…