internet comments

  • How to Write About Your Disability

    How to Write About Your Disability

    It’s like having the hiccups, you write instead. Everyone has had hiccups, after all. Accuracy is secondary to relatability, because you are tired, now, and twitchy, and the giant’s hands are pressing harder as you write.

  • Names Are Always the First Lock on Any Cage: Talking with Dolan Morgan

    Names Are Always the First Lock on Any Cage: Talking with Dolan Morgan

    Dolan Morgan discusses his latest short story collection, Insignificana, losing his favorite jacket, Internet comments, and the ending of Lost.

  • The Rumpus Interview with Leigh Stein

    The Rumpus Interview with Leigh Stein

    Leigh Stein discusses her new memoir, Land of Enchantment, co-founding Out of the Binders, and why most of her projects begin as “an idea that someone else pushes back on.”

  • Female Friendships and Online Literary Sexism

    Female Friendships and Online Literary Sexism

    As an essayist who often writes from personal experience and who’s working on a memoir, I believe deeply it is a feminist act for women to tell their stories.

  • Why Internet Comments Suck

    Wittgenstein explains why discourse on the Internet sucks. And it’s not just because of your crazy uncle. So, language is quicksand—except it’s not. Unlike the parlor tricks of the deconstructionists who bloviate about différance and traces, there clearly are rules that…

  • Word of the Day: Miasma

    (n.); noxious exhalations from putrid organic matter; poisonous effluvia or germs polluting the atmosphere; a dangerous, foreboding, or deathlike influence or atmosphere “If the Internet is a bridge to the greater world, a troll is the beast who lives under…

  • No Comment

    No Comment

    An hour later. Still empty. This bothers me. I am embarrassed that it bothers me. But not embarrassed enough that it stops me from checking again.

  • Weekly Geekery

    Science knows exactly how you feel right now. How the good enough get better. Intimacy and vulnerability on the Internet. Why women don’t comment online. Internet philistines are why we can’t have nice things.

  • Weekly Geekery

    The intricacies of Spambot sexuality. Refining the language of the online review. Is threatening to cut someone in the comments section protected speech? Sure, I know. You can quit Twitter anytime you want to. The science of sainthood.

  • Why You Should Read the Comments

    A profile of classicist Mary Beard at The New Yorker describes how Beard’s career in Britain brought her into the public eye. Beard gave a well-known lecture titled “Oh Do Shut Up Dear!” about how women (in literature and in…

  • Weekly Geekery

    It’s time to shut down the comments section. And all the writers around the world rejoice. Jerkology 101: The science of sorting out your social life. E-books you can fold. Techy the Slate writer says, “Only you can prevent the…

  • Trolls Are “Sadists and Psychopaths”

    Common wisdom has it that the Internet has disconnected people from their sense of empathy—but maybe it’s just exposed society at large to greater numbers of people who were already unempathetic. This Washington Post blog post reports on a Canadian study which…