the awl
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Different 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?…
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Journalism 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.
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Clicking 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…
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I 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…
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Meant 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…
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The 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.
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Our 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.…
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Queen 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…
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Rain 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…
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Practicing 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…
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Light 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…
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This 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…