This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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Posts Tagged: Harpers
Come for Me, Katie Roiphe
Backlash isn’t new to our Internet culture, but with Twitter and hot takes it does come for us a little faster.
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The Rumpus Interview with John Reed
John Reed discusses Snowball’s Chance, his parody of Animal Farm, and the lawsuits, debates, and discoveries that followed the book’s publication.
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The Rumpus Interview with David Lipsky
David Lipsky, whose book was recently adapted into the movie The End of the Tour, discusses his career as a writer and journalist as it’s evolved in the twenty years since his road trip with David Foster Wallace.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Every good story is rooted in conflict, and most of us learned the different types of conflict in our high school literature classes like clockwork, year in and year out: man v. man, man v. self, man v. society, man v. nature. To learn that last type, probably lots of us had to read Jack […]
...moreRumpus Women Should Be Writing for Harper’s!
The disparity of women writers in the publishing world has been an increasingly hot topic of late. Flavorwire has compiled a list entitled “10 Women Who Should be Writing for ‘Harper’s,” and we’re excited that three of the women are our own essays editor Roxane Gay, Dear Sugar’s Cheryl Strayed, and Funny Women editor Elissa Bassist! Flavorwire is […]
...moreWhat’s The Lifespan of a Fact?
Go behind the fact-checking scenes with this email exchange between Believer fact-checker and writer.
...moreA History of Plagiarism
What do Bob Dylan, Eli Wallach and Nabokov have in common? Artistic appropriation. And it’s not just those guys—but possibly all artists. Appropriation, recasting stories and lines into another form, is inherently a part of all art. Jonathan Lethem’s essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” discusses appropriation, plagiarism and the historically-relevant participants of this […]
...moreModern Reader #4: Without Style
I often wonder if reviews can be great. Can a book (or an essay) that is essentially “about” another book compare to an original work?
...morePoetic Lives Online: Links by Brian Spears
It’s Saturday night, the skies are cloudy, and the satellite reception keeps cutting in and out. Guess it’s time for some poetry links. I don’t generally link to poetry reviews elsewhere, but the NY Times reviews poetry so rarely that I figured I ought to do it if only for the sake of novelty. It’s […]
...moreSaturday Morning Links
It’s Saturday morning. Get the sleep out your eyes and start clicking. Farhad Manjoo has some solid ideas on how to beat the Kindle. Now, if only Amazon’s competitors will listen. There is great sadness in Sequoia National Park, at least for someone. Do you love car chase scenes in movies? They look a lot […]
...moreWeaponizing Irony
I have to admit, I feel a little assaulted myself after reading this proposal from Princeton Professors D. Graham Burnett and Jeff Dolven, which was a response to a request from Lockheed Martin for research initiatives. Warning: this isn’t Alanis Morrisette coincidence-mistaken-as-irony. This is the real stuff, fairly pure. You might need a towel.
...moreOn the Inner Voice
In preparation for a move, I’ve been cleaning out my files, and today I found an article I clipped from the June 2005 issue of Harper’s Magazine and stowed away: The Inner Voice, by Denise Riley. (Subscription and registration is required to view it online.) She begins with the following: “If a flower-streaked inward eye […]
...moreSome Pig
No doubt because of the media frenzy over the Swine Flu–or whatever we’re calling it now–Harpers has pulled a great piece on the factory farming of swine from their archives. This ran in 2006, and takes you every step of the way through the process, from the artificial insemination facility to the National Swine Improvement […]
...moreSaturday Morning Links
Okay, all you (us) iPhoniacs out there–who’ll be the first to come up with an App to make sure we become the downloader of the billionth app? Dan Kennedy channels former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens on that fancy new Twitter thingy. Ta-Nehisi Coates on why white people are allowed to dance badly. “The problem with […]
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