The Atlantic
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An “I” for an “I”
For a growing number of essayists, memoirists, and other wielders of the unwieldy “I,” confessional has become an unwelcome label—an implicit accusation of excessive self-absorption, of writing not just about oneself but for oneself. Over at the Atlantic, Leslie Jamison argues that personal…
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Word of the Day: Nescient
(adj.); absence of knowledge or awareness; ignorance; from Late Latin ne (“not”) + sciential (“knowledge”) “Prejudice is the child of ignorance.” –William Hazlitt, from his essay “On Prejudice.” There is any number of cliches to draw upon when describing ignorance.…
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Letting Them Go
Down at the Atlantic, Nathaniel Rich touches on Kazuo Ishiguro, memory, and literature’s Borgesian debts: The answer, as most readers will intuitively conclude, lies between two extremes. Forget everything and you lose your soul; remember everything and you lose the ability…
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Writing Fiction to Master Fear
Writing fiction, to me, feels a bit like the moment in those Roadrunner cartoons where he runs off the cliff and the bridge builds itself underneath his feet. You see the planks of wood flying up, supporting him, but if…
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Word of the Day: Suppalpation
(n); gaining affection by caressing; the act of enticing by soft words; from the Latin suppalpari (“to caress a little”) Simply put, written English is great for puns but terrible for learning to read or write. It’s like making children…
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Hornby Keeps It Fresh
For the Atlantic, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz interviews Nick Hornby about his new book Funny Girl and his experience adapting Cheryl Strayed’s Wild for the big screen. While Hornby says he would not consider writing a screenplay based on his own books, adapting other authors’ work…
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Clothing and Loss
In the fashion world, understanding the zeitgeist is a way of orienting oneself within a temporal framework. And it’s in this way that style is woven so memorably through Didion’s writing. What someone is wearing betrays not just the aesthetic…
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500 Years of Drunk
How many different words are there for “intoxicated”? Quite a lot, as it turns out—writers have been inventing new words to describe inebriation for just about as long as they’ve been drinking. A new book exploring the history of synonyms…
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Mr. Difficult, Mr. Easy
Is Moby-Dick really a tougher read than Fifty Shades of Grey? Noah Berlatsky argues that the distinction depends on the reader: …”difficulty” seems to hold out the possibility of more objective standards—to assure us that these books, over here, by…
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Was Prufrock the First Hipster?
For the Atlantic, Karen Swallow Prior puts a new spin on the origin story of the “hipster,” arguing that T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock was actually one of the first: Prufrock of the cuffed white flannel trousers cultivates a detached earnestness that…
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Subjective Objectivism
For the Atlantic, John Paul Rollert attends an Objectivist conference in Las Vegas to explore the legacy of Ayn Rand’s work. While for many Objectivists the philosophy “begins, and ends, with the word of Ayn Rand,” others question the “amenability” of Rand’s…
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Keeping an Emojiary
We all know that keeping a personal journal is pretty good both to for our writing and to help clarify the mind and spirit, but that it also takes a effort to keep a journal regularly. To help with that, Albert…