Other
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Ordinary, Complicated Suburbs
Tom Perrotta’s new collection of stories, Nine Inches, paints a vibrant portrait of community living in the affluent suburbs, giving equal weight to its tragedies and successes. As Alix Ohlin writes on the collection, Perrotta’s portrait is “an essential, if…
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The Plight of African Journalism
“If you say something happens in a place like Marikana [South Africa], for us to send a team of journalists to cover it directly it would be too expensive. I do think it’s a problem. When foreigners come here they…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Everything you think you know about space and time is wrong, the real answer is space crystals. A different take: Soviet propaganda for the non-Russian bloc. Terrible real estate agent photographs is your tumblr of the whatever. Are we really…
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McSweeney’s How Music Works Contest!
After much anticipation, David Byrne’s How Music Works is finally hot off the presses in PAPERBACK! Our friends and publishers at McSweeney’s have proposed a contest for fans and readers alike, tweet or Instagram a photo of the book’s poster…
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Forget Shark Week, It’s Goat Week!
Back in January, we blogged about a call for submissions at Modern Farmer, “a print quarterly and website devoted to the people, policy, animals, plants, and technology around farming and food.” The site has really come into its own by declaring…
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Existence of Typewriter Confuses and Angers Internet
Shortly after moving to New York, writer C. D. Hermelin decided to try a cool busking experiment: he’d sit out in parks with an old typewriter and compose on-the-fly stories for passersby, asking them to donate what they could. It…
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Invisible Man Gets A Little More Invisible
The Raw Story’s Arturo Garcia reports that Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man has been banned from school libraries and reading lists in Randolph County, North Carolina. After a parent decried the book as “not so innocent,” the school board voted 5–2…
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Secret Paintings Magically Appear in Old Books
If you haven’t yet seen these secret fore-edge paintings—paintings that appear on the side of the book opposite the spine when you squish the pages into a slanted line—they’re well worth a look. Both Flavorwire and io9 have posts with…
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On Living Apart Together
Can we make a lasting love that won’t offer the luxury of ignoring one another, as cohabitating couples can? Can we settle down together, apart?
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Real-Life Time-Traveling Fanfic
The Toast set social media on fire with a piece of literary gossip this week, and like all the best literary gossip, it’s over 100 years old. Here it is: Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde totally hooked up. Maybe. Probably.…
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This Novel Takes New-Media Writing to the Next Level
Danger lies in the insertion of any technology in fiction, whether it is misunderstood, clumsily included, or over-relied upon. It dates a work, but it also helps indicate how well a novel lives in that date: whether something has been captured, or…
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How Racism Hurts White Writers
The fight against inequality, the fight against The Default, is a fight for white spiritual and emotional freedom, not just the freedom of people of color, women, or gays and lesbians. In a diffuse but thought-provoking essay at Salon, Kartina Richardson…