Columns
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The Medium Is the Message
“Hoping this will aid in concealing your Sunday affliction,” read a card attached to the beige garment. “With the compliments of Clyfford Still.” In 1952, disgruntled abstract expressionist Clyfford Still sent art critic Emily Genauer a pair of rubber underpants in response…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Great news everybody! Cockroaches are (maybe) about to start flying around New York City! Did you Cloud Atlas in the US? It turns out you read a startling different book than the original. Elsewhere on the Guardian: the race to…
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Wishing and Hoping: Card Tricks, Love Spells, and Methods of Escape
I’ll go one further and posit that we need our illusionists: to disprove our eyes, investigate our dreams, and sometimes charm the money from our pockets.
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Bridging the Writing Gap
At The Awl, Jo Livingstone discusses the divide between academic and popular writing. In this first installment of a two-part series, she is joined by David Wolf, the commissioning editor of the Guardian’s Long Read section, who offers the editor’s perspective…
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Sex and Social Media
Over at the New York Review of Books, Zoë Heller writes about American Girls by Nancy Jo Sales and Girls and Sex by Peggy Orenstein: how each book deals with the concepts of female “hotness” and body positivity in the social…
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Lynch’s Perfect Musical Something
David Lynch is often cited for his influence on artists of all media—a fact which may come down to the director’s incredible ability to generate an atmosphere, a full immersive sense of being in a place or mindset. Beyond the Beyond:…
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Unlabelling Gender and Genre
I wonder about this in terms of genre. Just as I don’t want to identify as non-binary, regardless of the potential room for accuracy, I don’t want to identify as a “writer of neither genres.” But how much does want…
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Treatment and Healing
Treatment sometimes looks like hospitalization in an overcrowded psych ward and medication that can dissolve personality. Over at American Short Fiction, Jenna Kahn writes about the depiction of mental illness in literature—as found particularly in “The Depressed Person” by David…
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Tech, Humanity, Language, and Romance
For JSTOR Daily, Matt Langione reviews the current state of artificial intelligence, and the strides AI technology must make to fully complement human thought and experience. The latest step, Langione notes, is the news that Google began improving its “natural…
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Notable Los Angeles: 8/15–8/21
Monday 8/15: Brian Hastings presents and signs Song of the Deep. 6:30 p.m. at Vroman’s Bookstore. Ann Royal Nicholas discusses and signs The Muffia. 7 p.m. at Book Soup. Tuesday 8/16: The RwIrGiHtTe Read presents James Cushing, David Gale, Armine Iknadossian, and…
