The New Republic
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Is Writing Art or Profession?
For those who start within the establishment, professional writing is likely to correspond to drudgery, and they’ll seek to escape it. For those on the outside looking in, it’s a mark of legitimacy. The reasons behind why writers write is…
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Taking Students Seriously
Roxane Gay, over at The New Republic, on student activism: In the protests at Mizzou and Yale and elsewhere, students have made it clear that the status quo is unbearable. Whether we agree with these student protesters or not, we…
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A Language By Any Other Name
“Conlang” is short for “constructed language,” which is just what it sounds like: a language that has been constructed… conlanging is an art as well as a science, something you might do for your own pleasure, as well as for…
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Humpty Dumpty, the Original Mansplainer
I can explain all the poems that were ever invented—and a good many that haven’t been invented yet. No, that’s not the obnoxious guy from your Wallace Stevens seminar—that’s Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty, explaining “Jabberwocky” to Alice. Let Evan Kindley…
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The Academic as (Insufferable) Hero
Cagey and brainy, Bellow wanted to be the novelist of both the streets and the faculty lounge. Alas, in too much of his work, he serves as a cautionary tale of how schools can open minds but can also sometimes…
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Cheaters Sometimes Win
While the poetry world continues to grapple with the Best American Poetry controversy, perhaps its worth considering why anyone would try to game the system. Theodore Ross over at The New Republic explains how cheating is one of the best…
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The Myth of the Drunken Writer
Whoever the culprit, we clearly like our geniuses to be “consumed” by their craft, and we like them tortured—and if possible, drunk. At The New Republic, Michelle Dean writes about the myth of the tortured, alcoholic writer and how that…
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Silent Reading… or Not
But do we actually scan the written word silently? Recent neurological research questions whether silent reading actually is silent. Evidence grows that the brain interprets “silent” reading as an auditory phenomenon. Our ancestors most likely read aloud, in public, rather…
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Macho Literary Culture
Kingsley Amis all but disappeared from the American literary consciousness after his death. Many of his novels were not even available stateside after their initial publication, although a new line of reprints is changing that. However, The New Republic asks…
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The Beautiful Cubicle Farm
The Beautiful Bureaucrat intentionally or not taps into contemporary anxieties around Big Data: how (and why, and by whom) the minutia of our lives is captured, and to what ends. Anna Wiener, over at The New Republic, dives into Helen…
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All Work and No Pay
At The New Republic, Phoebe Maltz Bovy reflects on the implications of the recent #TenThingsNotToSayToAWriter trend, taking note of two distinct categories of responses: those expressing outrage that someone assumed they do not make a living off of writing, and…
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Lispector Revival
We’ve noticed a new wave of love for Clarice Lispector recently, and so has Benjamin Anastas at The New Republic. With the new translation and release of a complete edition of her stories, Anastas outlines how Lispector has been given the…