This Week in (Reproductive Rights) Essays
Our storytelling, the sharing of our necessary truths, is needed now more than ever.
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Posts Tagged: New York Times Magazine
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...moreThis Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Heather Havrilesky
We are in a chaotic mess of a world, and our lives are going to be chaotic messes no matter how victorious and shiny we manage to become.
...moreThe Person to Whom Things Happen
The question of what posture to take toward our own pain is unexpectedly complicated. How do we understand our own suffering—with what words and to what ends? For the New York Times Magazine, Parul Sehgal questions the terminology we use when talking about sexual assault: from “victim” to “survivor,” either term a kind of interpellation […]
...moreA Window to the World
Over at the New York Times Magazine, book critic and author Sam Anderson makes a compelling case for staring out windows: Windows are, in this sense, a powerful existential tool: a patch of the world, arbitrarily framed, from which we are physically isolated. The only thing you can do is look. You have no influence over […]
...moreBuilding a Black Literary Movement
The New York Times Magazine profiles editor Chris Jackson and how he’s building a literary movement for writers of color: ‘‘The great tradition of black art, generally,’’ he started again, ‘‘is the ability—unlike American art in general—to tell the truth. Because it was formed around the great American poison, the thing that poisoned American consciousness […]
...moreYear in Review
At The Morning News, prominent writers and thinkers discuss what they believe to be the most and least important events of the year. For example, Jazmine Hughes, associate digital editor of the New York Times Magazine, says: “The best and worst parts of this year are intricately related, two threads of 2015’s now-tattered pall. The past […]
...moreQueen of Hearts
“Hello” is not really a compassionate breakup song, like Carole King and Toni Stern’s “It’s Too Late”—the breakup here seems to have happened long ago—but rather an acknowledgment that you can never really make a clean break, that the memories float around like emotional flotsam and sometimes still land ashore. Singer-songwriter Adele has made music […]
...moreBooks for Pennies
Are the stories on pages of the books we love actually worth something in a monetary sense? If you ask sellers of bargain books, they may tell you those books are worth only cents on the dollar. Join the race to the bottom with the New York Times Magazine.
...moreA Fairy Tale, Reimagined
There’s the crown-letted frog who can’t seem to truly love any of the women willing to kiss him, and break the spell. There’s the prince who’s spent years trying to determine the location of the comatose princess he’s meant to revive with a kiss, and has lately been less devoted to searching mountain and glen, […]
...moreBanksy and Sarcasm
How wonderful it must feel to go to “Dismaland” and see through society! But how awful to see society embrace art that makes you feel nothing, that makes you think only about the vast chasm between you and everyone else. In an essay in the New York Times Magazine, Dan Brooks writes about street artist […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Austin Bunn
Austin Bunn talks about his new story collection, The Brink, his latest script for a short film, In the Hollow, working in multiple mediums, and why some novels read like early drafts of screenplays.
...moreThe Well-Paid Trolls
Reporting on Russian Internet trolls for the New York Times Magazine, Adrian Chen uncovers fake art exhibitions, follows “I Am Ass” on Twitter, and talks with a neo-Nazi. He’s also followed.
...moreTweeting Me Softly
Johnetta Elzie and DeRay McKesson, the authors of America’s first full scale 21st century civil rights movement, get the full profile treatment at the New York Times Magazine.
...moreStrolling Through New York
Nathaniel Rich breaks down New York’s reputation, and literary history, as the greatest walking city for NYT Magazine: Yet the idea of New York as a walker’s paradise—a city best, and only authentically, grasped by sauntering through it—has persisted. Much of the great literature of New York has been written from the perspective of the sidewalk: the deafening […]
...moreBelieve Me
Over at NYT Magazine, Etgar Keret slips us an essay on teaching his son the art of forgiveness: The minute we got into the taxi, I had a bad feeling. It wasn’t because the driver asked me impatiently to buckle the kid’s safety belt after I already had, or because he muttered something that sounded […]
...moreThe Second Saga
The New York Times Magazine has the second part of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s slow American road trip.
...moreOff the Island
Marlon James writes about leaving home for the New York Times Magazine: In creative writing, I teach that characters arise out of our need for them. By now, the person I created in New York was the only one I wanted to be. Over the next two years, I came and left often, pushing the limits of a […]
...moreThe “Loser Edit”
For the New York Times Magazine, Colson Whitehead traces the conception of the “loser edit,” and how it awaits us all. Fifteen years after the emergence of shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race, “the critical language used to carve up the phonies, saints and sad-sack wannabes of [these] reality shows has migrated, and the […]
...moreTeju Cole: On Photography
Among one of the many new aspects of the New York Times Magazine’s redesign is a cast of four columnists, each featured for one week during the month. Here’s Teju Cole on photography in his first installment.
...moreThe Last Pulp Star
Chris Offutt talks about the life and death his father, one of America’s last adult-pulp writers, for NY Times Magazine: In the mid-1960s, Dad purchased several porn novels through the mail. My mother recalls him reading them with disgust — not because of the content, but because of how poorly they were written. He hurled a […]
...moreThe First Wheel
In the New York Times Magazine, Wesley Yang profiles Eddie Huang, the author of Fresh Off The Boat, a memoir about his life as an Asian-American growing-up in Orlando. The book will soon become a primetime show on ABC. The writer, also a chef and host of Vice’s Huang’s World, has some reservations about Hollywood.
...moreTemporary Residence
At NYT Magazine, Maggie Jones profiles an entire generation: the South Korean adoptees making the trek back “home.” But having spent their lives abroad, where “home” is becomes a tough question to answer: As Trenka writes in her memoir, “The Language of Blood”: “How can I weigh the loss of my language and culture against the […]
...moreHow Not to Break
For NYT Magazine, Wils S. Hylton tackles the myth of Laura Hillenbrand, the bestselling nonfiction author who never really leaves her house: She is cut off not only from basic tools of reporting, like going places and seeing things, but also from all the promotional machinery of modern book selling. Because of [chronic fatigue syndrome], she […]
...moreWho Was Your First Kiss?
At the New York Times Magazine, A.O. Scott covers “A Brief History of Kissing in Movies.”
...moreThe Revelations of Marilynne Robinson
Wyatt Mason profiles Marilynne Robinson for the New York Times Magazine, asking her—among other things—“what do you think people should be talking about more?”
...moreHenry James & The Great YA Debate
Responding to the ongoing debate about whether or not American literature is saturated with young adult fiction (and if adults should read these novels), Christopher Beha, in the New Yorker, addresses A.O. Scott’s recent essay in the New York Times Magazine. While Scott dismisses Henry James and Edith Wharton as “outliers,” Beha refutes this point, […]
...morePatriarchy’s Slow Unwinding
For the New York Times Magazine, A.O. Scott argues about the “slow unwinding” of patriarchy in American culture, drawing on modern television, history, and literature. In part responding to Ruth Graham’s essay at Slate, in which she urges against adults reading young adult fiction, Scott offers a different perspective: Instead, notwithstanding a few outliers like Henry […]
...moreHonest to a Fault
You probably knew that Lena Dunham wrote a memoir (if you didn’t, she has), but she’d love to remind you why she’s qualified. Meghan Daum elaborates for the New York Times Magazine: To suggest that Dunham is too young, too privileged, too entitled, too narcissistic, neurotic and provincial (in that rarefied Manhattan-raised way) to be dispensing advice to […]
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