Other
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The Words They Carry
The Atlantic has begun curating a series of authors’ favorite passages, poems, and lines. The series is called By Heart and includes an essay on each selection and an illustration by Doug McLean. Many authors discuss their favorite line from their favorite…
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Happy Birthday, Herman Melville!
At the time of this posting, the 29th Annual Moby-Dick Marathon has about three hours left of its 24-hour reading of Herman Melville’s classic novel. When the reading finishes, attendees will celebrate Melville’s birthday “in old-fashioned style with song and cake.”…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Dan Weiss is on tour with his band for the next three plus weeks, but fear not: We’ll still be serving up your morning coffee. First, a peek into the world of 21st century princesses and male pinups. These snapshots, on the…
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The Puzzle Factory
But their eyes, reasonably, come back to me for their startling brilliance, even on drugs, and for their alertness and their knowing.
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Two-Sentence Horror Stories
Last week, a Reddit user posed a question: “What is the best horror story you can come up with in two sentences?” The question received over 14,000 comments and Buzzfeed compiled twelve of the best. Some are a little unnerving…
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When Incorrect Grammar Is Just the Right Thing
Vol. 1 Brooklyn has a nifty recurring feature called “Making Progress,” in which they interview writers about their process during projects that are still unfinished. In the latest installment, James Yeh has some really enchanting thoughts about “language that is…
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Listen to Sylvia Plath Read Her Poems Out Loud
Open Culture’s Josh Jones suggests listening to Sylvia Plath perform her poems out loud as a way to encounter them anew, “without the morbid celebrity baggage Plath’s name carries.” They do seem, in some ways, like completely different poems when…
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Writers When They Were Young
Have you seen these photos of famous authors as teenagers? The best are the ones with some text around them—for example, a local newspaper’s write-up of Flannery O’Connor’s youthful books about geese, and a yearbook description of “Peggy” Atwood’s “not-so-secret…
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James Deen on His Experience Filming The Canyons
You may remember from earlier this year a much-discussed New York Times Magazine piece about The Canyons, the super-low-budget film wrought from the unlikely combination of writer Bret Easton Ellis, director Paul Schrader, porn star James Deen, and troubled-as-ever actress Lindsay Lohan. With…
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Tom Stoppard Wins PEN/Pinter Award
This year’s PEN/Pinter Prize, “awarded annually to a British writer or a writer resident in Britain of outstanding literary merit,” goes to Tom Stoppard. Stoppard’s plays, including classics like Jumpers and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, have been interrogating philosophy, society, and…
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The Good News and the Bad News About Libraries
Bad news first: There are 49 libraries in Florida’s Miami-Dade County. Twenty-two of them are about to be closed. Some last-minute budget rearrangements might save six of those, but that will leave sixteen—one-third of the county’s libraries—on the chopping block.…
