Atlantic
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Whose Word?
In the midst of debate surrounding the Washington Redskins’s trademark cancellation, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg reminds us that a word is never completely free of its etymology. Rooted in a tradition of spectacle and minstrelsy, the use of a racial slur…
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Wimpy Bookstore with Strong Ideas
How does a child experience a book? It’s such a different experience reading on a tablet or a smartphone. A physical book has a heft, a permanence that you don’t get digitally. So our hope is that the bookstore will…
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The Self-Fulfilling Death of Humanities
Fearing the depreciating value of the humanities fields drives away talent and financial resources, concludes Benjamin Winterhalter, writing for the Atlantic. Humanities subjects include research areas often difficult to assess through quantitative methods, but, despite policymakers’ interest in statistical data,…
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Weekly Geekery
Keats said truth is beauty, but science disagrees. Changing technology means our writing is literally going to the crapper. Investigating the interaction between the mind and the outside world. Sussing out the Ur text of memes. What is the state…
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Not All Genres are Created Equal
Science fiction has a hefty brilliance to contribute to the literary world, but people often scoff at it as light, genre fiction. The Atlantic explores why science fiction is just as, if not more, relevant than non-genre fiction. Science fiction, I’ve always felt,…
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How to Make a Life in Literature
Have you been wondering what the point of the AWP conference might be to the 11,800 who attended this year? The Atlantic gives the ins, outs, and mishaps of the conference, along with tenuous or even doubtful optimism for the future…
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A History of Gun Control
One of the Longreads selections from the past week is this article in the Atlantic on gun control and the ambiguity of the second amendment’s language. This story doesn’t just divide into a two-sided argument over the right to bear…
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Undergrads Beware
An article in the Atlantic discusses the Washington Post’s graph that charts undergraduate degrees and their expected income levels. The Post’s graph seems pretty deterministic (or maybe it just reflects how trendy it is to plot income level against groups…