slate
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A Mélange of Loafing and Looking
In Leslie Jamison’s introduction to a new edition of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days & Collect, excerpted over at Slate, the word “specimen” is rescued from its isolating, clinical connotations, instead becoming realigned with Whitman’s vision of abundance and celebration. Jamison recounts…
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In Defense of “Elitism”
Rejection is an essential part of editing and publishing, but also a source of criticism of the industry. Over at Slate, Daniel Menaker comes to the defense of the publishing industry’s gatekeepers, explaining the importance of professionals in guiding the production…
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The Second Time Around
2014 wasn’t just the year of the debut—plenty of authors released their second novel, often considered the most challenging for writers to write. Slate sat down with some second-time novelists to discuss their sophomore efforts, like Family Life author Akhil…
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The New York Times Uncensored
At Slate, Justin Peters argues that the New York Times’s policy on profanity is in desperate need of updating.
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Back to the Future
The past is always a story, impossible to remember without molding it into a narrative that privileges some details over others and colors memory with tone. Reflecting on a recent trend toward biographical fiction, Joanna Scutts warns us about the…
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Story of an Artist
“You don’t have to be at the mercy of the muse. You need your own internalized thinking process that you can perform again and again.” Although Lena abandoned her desire to be an artist in the strict sense, her definition…
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Bookstores, Strike A Pose
For Slate, David Rosenberg explores the work of Bryan David Griffith, who spent the year photographing independent bookstores around the US. According to Griffith, the project is not meant to be nostalgic, but rather serves as a “study about the retail space,…
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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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Required Ideology in College Admissions
The Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology has added a new test to their admissions process. Prospective students are more likely to be admitted to the school if they prove that they are “confident” that they can “control” their own fates: Students…
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Reviving Tongva
Pamela Munro on reviving a language no one speaks: It’s hard to find information on Tongva. There are no audio recordings of people speaking the language, just a few scratchy wax cylinder recordings of Tongva songs. There are additional word…
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Surveillance in the Stacks
Librarians have hard-won reputations as defenders of open information and patron privacy, but what about third-party providers of library services? Slate’s Future Tense explores some recent revelations from companies like Adobe, whose Digital Editions e-book software has been criticized for…