This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...morePosts Tagged: the awl
Lady Killers and Our Obsession with Murder: Talking with Tori Telfer
Tori Telfer discusses her first book Lady Killers and the fragile “social saran wrap” that keeps us all from killing each other.
...moreThis Week in Essays
For Guernica, Carmen Maria Machado writes about cultural myths around large women and fighting to take up space with her body and her mind. Woe be to those who buy the Peggy couch. Anna Hezel pens a hilarious “buyer beware” at The Awl. Over at Lit Hub, Stéphane Gerson shares the process of writing his grief after losing his son.
...moreTransportation Sobriety Assistance
Writing for The Awl, Kristi Coulter gives sound advice on how to avoid airport bars: Once you’ve left the multiplex, you can swing by the Puppy Zone, or curl up in a big armchair, or — for fearful flyers — have a drop-in hypnotherapy session. By then, it should be time to pop onto your plane, stretch out, and […]
...moreBridging the Writing Gap
At The Awl, Jo Livingstone discusses the divide between academic and popular writing. In this first installment of a two-part series, she is joined by David Wolf, the commissioning editor of the Guardian’s Long Read section, who offers the editor’s perspective on the aims of each style.
...moreToo Many Books
If you’re only holding onto that copy of Infinite Jest to prove that you finished it, it might be time to let go. At The Awl, Nell Beram offers tips for spring-cleaning your book collection: “But what if I like those books?” you say. Well, then check them out at your library.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Heather Havrilesky
We are in a chaotic mess of a world, and our lives are going to be chaotic messes no matter how victorious and shiny we manage to become.
...moreCensoring Censorship
Emma Garman discusses the ability of UK’s elite to pay lawyers to keep their names out of the press. She raises the topics of censorship, public interest, and the availability of these resources to people of all classes: The loftiest interpretation of public interest is our common concern with the workings of government, but we’re […]
...moreNo Time Like Now
At 87 years old, filmmaker and countercultural icon Alejandro Jodorowsky continues to make art at an intimidating pace. He spoke with Anthony Paletta at The Awl about, among other things, his upcoming film Endless Poetry and the three additional films he’s got in the pipeline: I make a series of pictures. There was The Dance of Reality and […]
...moreThe Changing Face of Philadelphia Media
For The Awl, Andrew Thompson writes on the changing face of local media in Philadelphia, after the close of several local print papers and the rise of Philadelphia magazine.
...moreThe Role of the Critical Writer
For The Awl, Maria Bustillos sits down for lunch with writer Teju Cole in Bali, where Cole recently spoke at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival. The two discuss art, colonialism, and the role of the critical writer. Regarding the latter, Cole says: What it’s our job to do [as critics] is to help create and sustain […]
...moreSpelling Reformed
At The Awl, Annie Abrams gives the history of a 19th-century newspaper, Di Anglo-Sacsun, and its editors’ attempts to make literacy more available to the public, by developing their own phonetic alphabet that the newspaper was written in. Abrams also dives into the controversy surrounding the name of the paper: Andrews and Boyle pointedly explained that […]
...moreDifferent Voices
In the hilariously titled “The Fragile Ears of Men,” Leah Finnegan analyzes the gender politics of female singers’ voices, and why male music critics are so irked by Joanna Newsom: But really, what is a musician’s voice if not distinctive? Isn’t that… good? Entire pieces have been written about the voices of Bob Dylan and […]
...moreJournalism and the Content Farm
For The Awl, Sam Stecklow writes a detailed history of the Chicago Sun-Times‘s recent structural and cultural shift from a “gritty, urban, crime and fire and investigation daily newspaper” to a Sun-Times-branded national aggregated content network.
...moreClicking on This Story Won’t Pay Anybody
Noah Davis is running an experiment: how much will he earn off writing a news story about how much freelance journalists are paid. Like many freelance writers today, part of his compensation is based on the number of pageviews his article receives. Writing was never very lucrative, and the transition from a printed world to […]
...moreI Get My Favorite Short Stories From the CIA
The Kenyon Review. Mundo Nuevo. The Paris Review. Check out whether you’ve been unknowingly colluding with secret agents whilst reading your favorite lit mags. Patrick Iber writes, “The CIA became a major player in intellectual life during the Cold War—the closest thing that the US government had to a Ministry of Culture.” (The Rumpus would […]
...moreMeant To Be Seen
Laid in altars or specially constructed chapels, their miraculous flesh welcomes the meditative gaze of pilgrims of have come seeking the guidance of the dead, even though dead women do not speak. For The Awl, Stassa Edwards examines our cultural fascination with the figure of the dead girl.
...moreThe Invention of Eastern Europe
Harry Merritt writes for The Awl on the history of Eastern Europe as the traditional home of villainy, particularly in comic books and their cinematic universes.
...moreOur Words, Possessed by Fans
In the driest language possible, I would say that fan fiction successfully undermines the traditional American heteronormative dynamic in ways that can’t be undone. In wetter language, fan fiction sexualizes. It’s transgressive because it suggests the possibility of the erotic. It’s political, because it complicates power structures. And it’s personal, because it grants permission for […]
...moreQueen Joan
The act of anointing Joan Didion as our favorite, our best, our everything, is the act that reveals what we’re trying to say: that we’re cool, that we’re educated, that if we are not young and white and slender and well-dressed and disaffected and sad and committed to the art of writing as an arduous […]
...moreRain Dance
Over at The Awl, Josephine Livingstone treats us to poetics on the colorful sounds of precipitation: Actual rain falling on my urban windows was, however, just too good to miss. I have lived on three continents and my family comes from a fourth: these circumstances have forged in me a deep and abiding attachment to […]
...morePracticing Yoga with Sylvia Plath
This is the Plath poem I relate the most to shavasana. You sink down, you bubble back up. The Duchess of Nothing in yoga pants. For Carrie Frye, yoga practice and Sylvia Plath are inherently tied. She explains why in a lovely essay over at The Awl.
...moreLight Reading
Why do readers love to hate the Times’s Style section? While many of its trend pieces are guilty of the same transgressions committed elsewhere in mainstream media, a history of misogyny and homophobia directed at lifestyle journalism suggests our contempt goes beyond objective criticism: Far from detailing the paper’s ignominious decline into muddy ethical waters and […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Story|Houston published a beautiful story this week in their Fall 2014 issue, all of which centers around the theme of family, functional or otherwise. “Termites” tells the story of Tamara, aka Tam or Tam-Tam, a youngish woman living in and trying to take care of/sell her family’s childhood home on Staten Island. As you might […]
...moreYuppies Read
Now’s your chance to get your very own piece of David Foster Wallace. Today in New York, Sotheby’s art auction house is offering a small collection of letters the post-post-/meta-modern literary great once sent to his old friend JT Jackson, which Jackson sold to the Ransom Center in 2012. The correspondence includes everything from candid […]
...moreHow to Write (for Actual Legal Tender)
Over at The Awl, Heather Havrilesky, a writer without an MFA, has some humorous and candid freelancing tips for her MFA students and us readers. Havrilesky knows we’ll appreciate this advice, since she’s “one of the only writers [her] students know who earns actual legal tender from her writing—instead of say, free copies of Ploughshares”: It’s […]
...moreYour Fantasy Is Hurting You
When listening to a song, it becomes possible to slip out of reality and into a more idealized state as Chris Wallace writes in “Your Selfie Realization.” The trouble sets in when the fantasy self does not leave. As Wallace describes, it is possible to spend most of one’s time imagining an alternate reality. While […]
...moreTaking a Break from the Internet
We at the Rumpus love the Internet. We are, after all, a place to read, on the Internet (just check our Twitter bio). But sometimes it’s good to contemplate how exactly you’re using the Internet and why, as Matthew Gallaway does in this piece for the Awl: I had gradually become incapacitated by the endless […]
...moreThe gift of not responding
There’s a big secret Twitter doesn’t want you to know, as Choire Sicha writes in a recent article on The Awl. “You don’t have to respond to anyone on Twitter. Ever.” Sicha lists a number of reasons one might choose to not respond on Twitter. Highlights of the list include: “You don’t care,” “You have […]
...moreExistence of Typewriter Confuses and Angers Internet
Shortly after moving to New York, writer C. D. Hermelin decided to try a cool busking experiment: he’d sit out in parks with an old typewriter and compose on-the-fly stories for passersby, asking them to donate what they could. It was a lot of fun—until someone posted a picture of him online and the Internet […]
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