slate
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The City Where Grown-Ups Live
Rumpus columnist Sari Botton has just published a new collection of essays, Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. Over at Slate, you can read Elliott Kalan’s contribution, “The City Where Grown-Ups Live.”
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Second Time’s the Charm
Slate and the Whiting Foundation have teamed up to save authors from the dreaded sophomore slump in a quest to unearth the five best second novels of the last five years. Novelists Yiyun Li and Colson Whitehead will be judging…
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The Rumpus Interview with Lev Grossman
Lev Grossman discusses the challenges of writing a series, why his 20s were a lost decade, and his relationship with his readers.
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Sharing Our Words
Writers often overuse a few unique words, creating a linguistic fingerprint. Vocabulary words are also exchanged between social groups. Some people contribute new words, while others adopt them. The process is not entirely random, though: Diana Boxer, a professor at…
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Indie Bookstores On the Rise
A few years ago it seemed Amazon was about to send independent bookstores the way of Blockbuster Video. Now more than ever though, we’re living in a new Renaissance of independent bookstores. Slate explains why: Independent bookstores never had to answer…
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The Loneliest Whale In The Ocean
Somewhere in the Pacific ocean, a whale of unprecedented size is swimming around and calling out to other whales, with no response. This is the “52 Blue” whale, subject of worldwide devotion and fascination and a beautiful new essay on…
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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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Not All Books Are Novels
People have taken to using the terms “book” and “novel” interchangeably, but non-fiction books are not novels, Ben Yagoda explains over at Slate. The shift might be attributed to the post-modern zeitgeist that blends fact and fiction into a fuzzy…
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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…
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Returning to Poverty
Slate has a haunting photo essay called “Living Below the Poverty Line in Troy, New York.” The photographs are by Brenda Ann Kenneally, who grew up in Troy. She left when she was 17 after a pregnancy and abortion and…
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The Greatest Short Story of All-Time
“Kipling,” says a psychiatrist friend of mine, “was always pretending to be something other than he actually was—which was a 10-year-old boy.” His work, the best of it, has a boy’s barbarism and a boy’s conservatism. “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” succeeds so spectacularly…
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Privilege vs. Privilege
In an excerpt from her book The Shelf, Phyllis Rose illustrates the systematic dismissal of women writers through the imagined figure of Prospero’s Daughter: wealthy and educated yet burdened by the demands of a family life whose quotidian challenges, having…