The New Republic
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Book Recs from a River-Rafting Joan Didion
To go with her contribution, Didion had to provide a few sentences about herself. Excavated from the Mademoiselle archives, what she wrote shows a still somewhat green, aspiring writer with a sentimental attachment to home: “Joan spends vacations river-rafting and…
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Readymade Novels
According to Shaj Mathew, novelists are more and more approaching writing as conceptual art, creating “readymade” novels. You can read his take on the “Reality Hunger generation” over at The New Republic.
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The Thing Itself
You can’t put everything in the cloud. Over at The New Republic, William Giraldi makes the case for holding onto books in their physical form: We might be reading them—although I find that an e-reader’s scrolling and swiping are invitations to…
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The Millennial Generation’s Writer
In The New Republic, Anna Weiner discusses Renata Adler’s new boost in popularity among New York City’s young creative class: In the post-9/11 generation—a cohort caught between the promise of an economy that values creative work and the scarring, post-crash…
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Life Behind the Copy Desk
Reviewing Mary Norris’s Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen for The New Republic, Julia Holmes reflects on her own experience as a copy editor, as well as her place in the magazine class system.
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Irving Howe’s Poor Timing
In The New Republic, David Marcus has a comprehensive essay on Irving Howe, exploring, among other things, how the writer’s generation may have had setbacks by arriving too “late” but also too “early.”
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The Man Who Brings Us France
A profile on Arthur Goldhammer, who has translated over 100 books from French to English. As a translator, Goldhammer tries to find a pragmatic middle-ground between literalism and freestyle. The goal is to be faithful to the contents of a…
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Before There Was Facebook, There Was Oscar Wilde with a Yellow Handkerchief
In January 1882, before he wrote “The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray, or any of the great works for which we honor him today,” Oscar Wilde went on a tour throughout the United States, lecturing about…
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Weekly Geekery
Science knows exactly how you feel right now. How the good enough get better. Intimacy and vulnerability on the Internet. Why women don’t comment online. Internet philistines are why we can’t have nice things.
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Fetishizing Cuba
For The New Republic, Ryan Kearney responds to those claiming that American tourism and investment will ruin Cuba’s romanticism: If you visit Cuba to puff cigars, get drunk on rum-and-cokes or mojitos, read Hemingway, and fetishize the country’s dilapidation with your…
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The Real Crisis
Along with the other onslaught of reactions to The New Republic’s mass resignation, George Packer offers his own response at the New Yorker, suggesting that the “collapse” (along with the recent Rolling Stone debacle) shows a “crisis” in journalism: The…