the awl
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Melding Web Content and Advertising
Choire Sicha writes about the visual evolution of the internet over at The Awl. Sicha discusses the fact that advertisements are being woven into the content of websites, such as promoted tweets from a corporation being plopped to the top of…
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The Less You Tell
“For the shy and passive aggressive, blackmail might be the perfect means of control. Hone your blackmailing chops and you can utilize them in a range of scenarios: betrayal, revenge, moral castigation (theirs, not yours).” The Awl is in the…
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The Death (and Rebirth?) of the Book Review
Why review books? At The Awl, Jane Hu takes a historical approach to answering that question. Quoting writers from Alexander Pope to Jonathan Franzen, Hu argues that the apparently ever-progressing “death” of the book review is perhaps a more nuanced…
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Frisked On the Way to School
“They asked us where we coming from, and they asked us to see ID. And we said ‘We 12, we don’t got ID.’” The NYPD stopped teenagers over 140,000 times in 2011. WNYC mapped all of these recorded stops, revealing…
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“Pachyderm”
Don’t miss this poem from Sherman Alexie’s forthcoming collection, Blasphemy: New and Selected Stories. “Until he became an elephant, Sheldon referred to his left hand as ‘my hand’ and to his right hand as ‘my brother’s hand.’”
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Stories We Tell
Molly Boyle writes about how murder ballads helped in her efforts to find the “sublimity of survival” after an attempted rape. “The stories we tell ourselves happen often to be about dying, in the most romantic, sometimes pat, often campy…
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On The ASME Imbalance
At The Awl, Lucy Madison breaks down the many numbers, ratios, and biases behind the absence of women nominees in the National Magazine Awards’ major “brass-ring” categories. “As far as the ASME awards go, women are unlikely to see a…
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On Romance Fiction
At The Awl, Maria Bustillos takes a closer look at romance novels, characterizing the genre as “underground writing,” while wondering what makes literature “trivial”? “There are distinct advantages in this poor-cousin status. Here is a literature entirely without pretense; its…
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R.I.P. Etta James
Etta James has passed away at the age of 73. The New Yorker reflects on her life and songs. The Awl pays tribute with this playlist.
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Judging Teachers
This new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research has been getting major press attention. At The Awl, Maria Bustillos questions the merit of the study and its efforts to “identify and fire ‘weaker’ teachers, for the sake of…
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Skulls, Stories
The Awl interviews Jeanne Kelly, “a visual artist with a background in forensic art,” about her Kickstarter proposal that went unfunded. The project was inspired by Victorian human skulls from the Mutter Museum. After selecting eight people (one of whom…
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Looking Ahead
The Awl has charted 2012 with far-reaching predictions that range from politics and media to cuisine. Check it out to discover which state will be sold to China, what bird will become America’s new superfood, and meet the “serial killer…