Los Angeles Review of Books
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Your Brain on History
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Larry S. McGrath writes about the growing role of neuroscience in writing new historical narratives. McGrath frames this discussion in a review of historian Lynn Hunt’s Writing History in the Global Era, looking…
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Never Protest the Same Way Twice
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Justin Campbell interviewed Micah White about founding Adbusters, his struggle growing up biracial, and how one should never protest the same way twice.
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Writing Realness
I took the part of me that was the most sensitive, and I asked what it would be like to be the most raw version of myself, in a world that is actually pushing in on me. In an interview…
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Writing about Music, Dancing about Architecture
Radio is undergoing the sort of DIY revolution that journalism faced with the advent of blogs. If ‘Out on the Wire’ helps convince the legions of amateur podcasters that good radio is far more than recording hour upon hour of…
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On Birds in the Wild
In a hauntingly poignant review of Helen Macdonald’s lovely H Is for Hawk, the Los Angeles Review of Books’s Dinah Lenney writes about her own experience of loss and the turning toward the natural world: In grief, what I found: birds…
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Don’t (Blurb) Speak
Wallace coined the helpful term “blurbspeak,” which he defined as “a very special subdialect of English that’s partly hyperbole, but it’s also phrases that sound really good and are very compelling in an advertorial sense, but if you think about…
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Words, Music, Words, Music … and Glass
He is one of the only artists … who actually seemed to enjoy his journey, both spiritual and musical. Plus, he seemed to learn something profound with each step of his way, until completely formed as an artist. In a…
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To Pimp Postmodernism
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Casey Michael Henry considers Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly a new bid to revive a “Black Postmodernism”: Not only does the album fulfill many specific qualities of postmodernism, and postmodernism specifically shaped…
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The Secrets of Paris
To form secrets with a city is to treat it like a lover, to imagine you know it better than anyone, but to still expect it to surprise you for years to come. It is the secret to all rewarding…
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A Different Kind of Spinster
I’m in my 30s and haven’t married yet, but marriage is not in my own top five questions and hasn’t been for some time. I’m much more interested in whether I’ll write a book or have kids, and much more…
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Critical, Dialectical, Skeptical, Desimplifying
Writers, Sontag believed, if they are any good at all, are obliged to try to understand the forces that shape us. They seek to give us a more truthful sense of things, a more nuanced sense of the world we…
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Seeing is (Not) Believing
Does perception provide us with an accurate picture of reality? To what extent is our environment a reflection of our psychological state? UCLA Philosophy Professor Josh Armstrong examines all sorts of thought-provoking questions in his critique of John Searle’s Seeing…