Don’t “Do” Rome
At Full Stop, Stephanie Bernhard writes about why we shouldn’t “do” cities. “To suggest that a city or site can be “done,” like dishes, the laundry, or homework, reduces said…
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Everything that can’t be categorized but is still wonderful!
Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
“If an intelligent life form has built a spaceship, there’s the question of ‘why not make it out of stone or coral?'” Good question. Is there an alien spaceship at the…
Juneteenth
In honor of Juneteenth, The Root investigates “the blurred line of emancipation in America,” from 1883 through the present. Feministing breaks down the wording of the Emancipation Proclamation, shedding light…
Chuck Palahniuk’s “victims of his gore-filled prose”
On June 11, Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and Choke, published Invisible Monsters Remix, a director’s cut of the novel in which “the reader is made to jump back and…
The Death (and Rebirth?) of the Book Review
Why review books? At The Awl, Jane Hu takes a historical approach to answering that question. Quoting writers from Alexander Pope to Jonathan Franzen, Hu argues that the apparently ever-progressing…
The Latest Diary of Adrian Mole, Coming of (Middle) Age
Adrian Mole, protagonist of the coming-of-age novels The Adrian Mole Diaries, faces adult problems in Sue Townsend’s latest book, the 10th in the series. “Having had his first incarnation aged 13…
“I’m a highway and landscapes. You’re a city and painted bricks and lots of people.”
New Yorker columnist Ben Greenman has transcribed bits of an interview that took place at this year’s BookExpo America between Patti Smith and Neil Young, on the subject of Young’s…
Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Whoa: “Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, for ever.” Aliens of yore. The Story of Stuff looks to change. The first alternative-fuel gas station has…
E-Books: “the book-cover equivalent of burqas”
In the Chicago Tribune, Christopher Borrelli bemoans the rise of e-books for taking away “the genuine soul” that “the randomness and variety and art work of a tangible book being…
Clarice Lispector
“But what if there were no one around with whom to reach an agreement about the meaning of a word? What if the thing you’re trying to express can’t really…
Library Lamentations
“A library is a different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.” How do we…
Imperfect Heroes
“I learned from my political experiences that I am a writer, not a politician. Part of the reasons I have lived the life I have is because I wanted to…