katy waldman
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Identity Politics and the English Language: Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times
Who “owns” the English language?
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Kid’s Lit: Team Order or Team Nonsense?
Children’s literature as a genre has grown exponentially from early morality-racked lesson books to modern goofy masterpieces such as Captain Underpants—how did we switch from Order to Nonsense, and have we completely switched over? At Slate, Katy Waldman sits down with…
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In Favor of Reading the Literary Canon
The canon is what it is, and anyone who wishes to understand how it continues to flow forward needs to learn to swim around in it. Responding to Yale students’ protesting the English department’s course requirements, Slate’s Katy Waldman argues…
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Total Noise and Complete Saturation
For as long as I can remember I’ve been interested, in a clinical way, in silence.
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Consider the Ellipsis
In the latest installment of Lexicon Valley over at Slate, Katy Waldman considers how to use an ellipsis with the aid of F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot.
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Stories That Care
Reflecting on 20 successful years of Chicken Soup for the [Insert Identity Here] Soul, Katy Waldman explains why the same clichés get us every time: Despite the growth of the self-help market, has the recession, or irony, destroyed Chicken Soup’s…
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Reading Incompetent
Are we right to be nostalgic for a time before the internet when we could just read? Katy Waldman, writing for Slate, wonders if we might be misremembering things. I also realize, typing this confession of pathological distractibility, that I may…
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Everything in Its Right Place
The rules come so naturally to us that we rarely learn about them in school, but over the past few decades language nerds have been monitoring modifiers, grouping them into categories, and straining to find logic in how people instinctively…
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Think (and Think Some More) Before You Speak
Notably, there are a few verbal tics that we mistakenly think index insecurity, even though they don’t. These (mostly feminine) quirks—uptalk, vocal fry—are often subtle expressions of power, innovativeness, or upward mobility. In fact, Adam Gopnik recently wrote about how…
