The Atlantic
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The Elusive Happy Ending
Happy endings are hard to come by in great literature, especially in stories that center on affluent American suburbs and their inhabitants. Over at the Atlantic, writer Ted Thompson looks at the hopeful and redemptive (but still believable) dramatic climax…
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Pippi Longstocking Has Best Week Ever
Not only did the beloved redheaded children’s character get a shout-out from Lena Dunham, but Longstocking creator Astrid Lindgren will be immortalized on Sweden’s 20 Krona note.
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YA Heroines Don’t Get Fat (Or Tall)
The action heroine archetype is enjoying something of a golden age with blockbuster young adult novels like The Hunger Games and Divergent series starring strong female leads. But Julianne Ross over at The Atlantic has noticed a disturbing trend: all…
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The Decline of Punctuation?!…
We live in a heyday of punctuation. “Call this what you will—exclamatory excess, punctuation inflation, the result of the Internet’s limitless expanse—it is everywhere,” writes Megan Garber at the Atlantic. But perhaps not for long—with the rise of image-based expression…
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Slow Down, Speed Reading Enthusiasts
Last week, we talked about the new speed reading app Spritz, which promises to have us reading faster than we ever thought possible. As it turns out, it may not be possible after all—or so argues this article up at…
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How Women Write About Sex
Do women have more trouble writing about sex than men? Claire Dederer, writing in the Atlantic, thinks so. As a writer, I find myself compelled to reconcile the blithe sexual picaresque of my youth with the contrasting Sturm und Drang in…
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Writers Really Are The Worst Procrastinators
“I once asked a talented and fairly famous colleague how he managed to regularly produce such highly regarded 8,000 word features. “Well,” he said, “first, I put it off for two or three weeks. Then I sit down to write.…
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America Not Exactly a Nation of Book Lovers
According to a recent Pew poll, 23 percent of Americans didn’t read even a single book last year. That number has been rising steadily, from 8 percent in 1978, to 16 percent in 1990, to the current figure. The Atlantic‘s Jordan…
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Poetry Is Useful—Or At Least It Can Be
Poetry is always already revolutionary, then. What it says hardly matters. Poetry is useful because of its useless essence, not because of its individual meaning. Of course, this is nonsense. The way Noah Berlatsky sees it, mainstream culture and poets agree…
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When can online comments help?
We have written about the dangers of reading the comments before online. There are times however when it can be beneficial. Simone Supekar writes over at The Atlantic about how the comments on the internet helped her cope with a…
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Coping with Anxiety
Editor of The Atlantic, Scott Stossel, suffers from anxiety, and he’s hardly alone. In an essay called “Surviving Anxiety,” Stossel chronicles his lifetime battle with the nation’s most common mental illness, describing himself from the age of two on as…
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The Crossword Puzzle Turns 100
Word nerds, it’s time for a celebration: the crossword puzzle turned 100 years old over the weekend. See if you can solve the first one ever published—it was shaped like a diamond and called a “word-cross puzzle,” among other slightly…