slate
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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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Living Wages Cost More Money
A new study has revealed why academic adjuncts are paid so little: living wages would cost universities a lot more money. A new study says that converting adjunct faculty to tenure track positions would cost $27 billion dollars. The study…
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Fan Fiction Gone Wild
Slate’s Laura Miller details the bizarre tale of the copyright lawsuit between two No. 1 New York Times best-selling fantasy authors, showing the potential messiness of fan fiction going mainstream: If these tropes sound familiar to you, you’re not alone.…
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Hating Your Own Book Trailer
Slate is on the case, looking at why so many book trailers are self-loathing: Behold Jonathan Franzen, opening his book trailer for Freedom with the words: “This might be a good place for me to register my profound discomfort at…
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Fireflies, Tweets, and Jolts of Nostalgia
Over at Slate, writer Elizabeth McCracken muses about what people miss most about home and how reminiscing on Twitter creates a shared experience. She writes: Previously I would have said that nostalgia can never be experienced secondhand, but it turns…
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Writing on Old Age
For Slate, Laura Miller reviews the way old age is explored and rendered through literature, especially by those of old age themselves: The essays in Alive, Alive Oh! resolve in a stubbornly untidy fashion; Athill rejects the unspoken, oppressively conventional “wisdom”…
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For Men and By Men
Slate’s Rebecca Onion and Andrew Kahn analyze the overwhelming maleness of both the subjects and authors of history books, discussing their findings with book publishers: Our data set revealed some answers about the publishing of popular history that we expected:…
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Gawker’s Problem with Women
Gawker has been failing its female employees. Gawker may pay its writers, but as Evans found out after staffers voted to unionize, Gawker doesn’t pay its writers equally: The union effort prompted my discovery of an egregious pay discrepancy, which…
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Libraries Aren’t Just About Books
For Slate, Jacob Brogan suggests that despite “shrinking book racks,” libraries play an important political and social role. This is particularly true in low-income areas, as libraries provide computer access for job searchers and entrepreneurs: Libraries are powerful precisely because they’re…
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Nearer to Nonsense
If “show, don’t tell” were really that great advice, why bother writing anything at all? Slate’s Forrest Wickman makes the case for saying what you mean: Twenty-first-century tastemakers like to think of themselves as beyond highbrow vs. lowbrow—that monocle popped…
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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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Books Win!
For Slate, Ruth Graham suggests that improved access to books and a decline in censorship has turned Banned Books Week into “crock”. So “instead of hand-wringing about a nonexistent wave of censorship,” Graham encourages readers to think about the week with…