The Atlantic
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Narrative Dependencies
People contain multitudes, and by multitudes, I mean libraries. For the Atlantic, Julie Beck presents us with a thrilling article on narrative psychology, providing some scientific basis for that brilliant statement by Joan Didion: we tell ourselves stories in order…
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If Trees Could Touch-Type
Just when you thought long-form communication was dead. The city of Melbourne gave email addresses to trees, which has incurred an outpouring of love letters and even exchanges between people and their addressee-trees.
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Economy of Language
The Global Language Monitor estimates that the English language has over a million words. In contrast, the invented language Toki Pona has just over a hundred—a feature “designed to change how speakers think.” Its simplicity, besides making the language easy…
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Competitive Writing
If you win, then you talk to the other winners, congratulating and praising them. If you lose, then you read through your submission, noting mistakes that weren’t there five minutes before, wondering where you went wrong,” she adds. “You tell…
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Preserving Poetic Packaging
Remember the literary packaging that Jonathan Safran Foer developed with Chipotle? Well, someone at Yale has decided it’s worth holding onto—the Beinecke Rare Book Library will soon add a complete set of the cups and carry-out bags printed with the…
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Music and Letters
Over at the Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber takes us back in time to the text-heavy rock ‘n’ roll ads of the 70s, early in the days of rock magazines—a stark contrast to the image-based music ads of today: Per the famous…
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The Great Gay Novel
But no coverage of the book I’ve seen has discussed it as a novel fundamentally about gay lives—as the most ambitious chronicle of the social and emotional lives of gay men to have emerged for many years. Garth Greenwell claims…
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Word of the Day: Quiddity
(n.); the essence or inherent nature of a person or thing; an eccentricity; an odd feature; a trifle, nicety or quibble; from the Latin quid (“what”) “He was friendly, polite, and deeply interested in even the fine points I raised,…
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An Author Without A Critic
For the Atlantic, David Frum argues “a fair claim that” Herman Wouk is “among the greatest American war novelists of them all,” despite the positive criticism that has eluded his work.
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Charles Simic on Walt Whitman
Poet Charles Simic may prefer the “pleasant aftertaste” of a literary amuse-bouche before bed, but when prompted about one of his favorite literary passages, he chose Walt Whitman’s “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim.” Over at…
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This Week in Short Fiction
You can count on One Story as a sort of literary sieve, distilling story-sized servings of up-and-coming writers we should know, and soon enough will know, if we don’t know them already. Next week, One Story will host its annual Literary…
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Make Them Pay
They say print journalism is dying because it’s inconvenient and expensive. At the Atlantic, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti makes a case for jacking up the price even more.