This Week in (Reproductive Rights) Essays
Our storytelling, the sharing of our necessary truths, is needed now more than ever.
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Posts Tagged: The Nation
The Third Iago Sensibility: A Conversation with Laurie Stone
Laurie Stone discusses her story collection, My Life as an Animal, writing about death, how the reader doesn’t care about you, and the Third Iago.
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Where You Put It on the Line: A Conversation with Mychal Denzel Smith
Mychal Denzel Smith discusses his debut nonfiction book Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching, how the activist space has changed in recent years, and who he is writing for.
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent and relevant content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just […]
...morePorn is Complicated
There’s been a lot of thoughtful criticism on porn, written by women, recently—notably, Katrina Forrester in the New Yorker and Natasha Lennard in The Nation. For Granta, Andrea Stuart choses a unique angle in her own piece on porn, writing a genre-bending essay that can best be described as a reported piece of first-person criticism. After positioning herself in the feminist […]
...morePhotography and What It Means to Be Anti-Racist
Photography is often considered “objective”—a technology with the ability to capture people, things and places as they were during one moment in time. The art form has a long history of depicting race powerfully in America, both in disproving difference across racial divides and in evoking emotion and depicting the gravity of tragedy. For The Nation, Matthew […]
...moreTo Speak Unsatisfactorily
To memorialize a tragedy, one must inscribe unmistakable significance into reticent materials, attempting to curb the natural processes of forgetting and obsolescence. For The Nation, Becca Rothfeld writes about W.G. Sebald, author of The Emigrants, among others, and his obsession with artistic expression as the aestheticization of truth, almost necessarily a “mangling,” when the goal is […]
...moreCan Unions Diversify Publishing?
The publishing industry is very white—79% as of 2016. One way to change that might be to unionize publishing workforces, argues J.C. Pan at The Nation. Pan cites the unionization of The New Press, where workers included an affirmative-action clause in their negotiated contract. Unions aren’t the only solution since workers still need to value diversity […]
...moreFinding Kafka
Was Franz Kafka really a tortured neurotic writer? A new biography shows a different side of the surreal German writer: He loved beer and slapstick. He undertook a fitness regime popularized by a Danish exercise guru. He tried to cheat on his high-school exams. He used his desk as a metaphor for self-parody and waxed lyrical […]
...moreFundamentally Unfamiliar
At The Nation, Ava Kofman talks about Clarice Lispector and her continual mystique as a writer who refuted such nonsense as plot, rebuked literature from Borges to Joyce, and still captured the literary world with a fierce grip and claws: Or as Lispector put it: “I can’t sum myself up because you can’t add a […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Gira Grant
Melissa Gira Grant talks sex workers’ rights, labor politics, the novelty of women’s sexuality, and her book, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work.
...moreBig Data is the Key
Over at The Nation, Moira Weigel gives a thought-provoking perspective on digital humanities, and identifies some of the field’s intellectual precursors. The idea that big data holds the key to unlocking mysteries of literature and history is the logical extension of a larger cultural obsession with computer analysis; it’s also a little absurd to any […]
...moreLibrarians and the Patriot Act
Librarians have long been on the forefront of information management; in the digital age, they are more invested than ever in protecting the free flow of information to the public, and protecting it from the overreaches of government prying. In June, key provisions of the Patriot Act that justified the government’s massive data collection efforts […]
...moreWords for Words Without Music
Philip Glass has written a memoir. Philip Glass has written a memoir. The composer Philip Glass has written a memoir. Philip Glass has written a memoir. It begins in Baltimore. The composer Philip Glass has written a memoir. It begins in Baltimore. The American composer Philip Glass, known for his use of repetition and incremental […]
...moreThe Decline of the University Press
The university press system has faced a rapid decline. Research libraries, looking to cut costs to pay for expensive electronic journal subscriptions, buy fewer monographs. Subsidies from parent institutions are down. Meanwhile, the researchers who publish with and rely on content from university presses demand access to digital content. The Nation explores the rise and […]
...moreThe Rise of a New Socialist Literary Scene
Facing financial inequality and burdened with debt, millennials have discovered Marxism, writes Timothy Shenk for the Nation. And millennial writers are leveraging technology, rejecting old guard institutions, and constructing new forums for discussion: Combine all this with some fondness for navel gazing and with the fortunes of geography—politics aside, New York writers are New York […]
...moreHow Toxic Is Online Feminism?
There’s a heated conversation about online feminism happening—where else?—online right now. Ignited by a piece in the Nation about Internet toxicity as well as an ill-advised xoJane piece about white privilege in yoga class, the discussion is focusing on intersectionality in feminism, particularly as it regards race. Latoya Peterson has a lot of really smart stuff […]
...moreRembering Wanda Coleman
Known as the “L.A. Blueswoman” and “the unofficial poet laureate of Los Angeles”, Wanda Coleman passed away at the age of 67 on November 22, 2013. There are some very lovely tributes to Coleman at the LA Times and at The Nation. The Poetry Foundation has a great rundown of Coleman’s life and career with […]
...more“What the Hell Is A ‘Writer of Color,’ Anyway?”
As part of her latest push to get the literary community talking seriously about diversity, our inimitable essays editor Roxane Gay has a piece up at the Nation about some of the thrilling, confounding, challenging books by writers of color out right now. In it, she interrogates the very notion of a “writer of color” and what […]
...moreWhat VIDA Stats Mean on A Personal Level
This year’s VIDA stats gave us a (depressing) wide-lens view of women’s status in the writing industry, but for a (depressing) close-up perspective, read Deborah Copaken Kogan’s recent essay in The Nation about the sexism she’s encountered during her career as a photographer and writer. It’s a good example of that stomach-dropping mix of “Did they seriously do […]
...moreCyber Stalking Really Is That Bad
Caleb Crain over at The Nation digs in deep to James Lasdun’s new memoir, Give Me Everything You Have, the seemingly terrifying story of his “persecution on the internet by a clever, mentally unbalanced person.” The cyber-harassment (a wildly tame description of Lasdun’s struggle) was the work of a former student of Lasdun’s, who tormented him […]
...more“What It’s Like to be a Problem”
At The Nation, Melissa Harris-Perry breaks down the wider political context surrounding the Trayvon Martin killing, outlining the historical and contemporary reality in which it is “acceptable to presume the guilt” of black bodies. “Liberal democracy—based on commitment to individual liberty and dignity—does not exist if the government legislates against particular bodies in public spaces, […]
...moreOn Zoe Strauss and Thinking Big
At The Nation, Barry Schwabsky writes about photographer Zoe Strauss’ “Ten Years” exhibition. Exploring Strauss’ evolving approach to photographic techniques, portraiture and storytelling, Schwabsky argues that her artistic triumphs come from “thinking big”. “Strauss’s work was a runaway from birth, and by putting her photographs on billboards she is returning them to the streets from […]
...moreFractured Systems
The Nation explores the poetry of Juliana Spahr, Noah Eli Gordon, Anna Moschovakis and Kathleen Ossip, articulating how all four poets react to “big modern systems,” while rendering compounded emotions. “In paths through and under and around those systems, economic, environmental and linguistic, these poets address what the critic and poet Christopher Nealon calls the […]
...moreOn Ann Beattie
“Beattie is an artist of silence, of the things we don’t say or can’t, the things that find expression anyway. She is an artist of the space between the words—of commas and dashes and periods; of section breaks, blank spaces that her characters seem to hit as if running into a wall.” The Nation has […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Baumgardner
Jennifer Baumgardner, a third wave feminist and activist, discusses archiving, zines, Bjork and her new book, F ’em!: Goo Goo, Gaga, and Some Thoughts on Balls.
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