The New Republic
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Journalism vs. Silicon Valley
What is really at the heart of the debate over The New Republic? The tension between an engineering culture and an editorial culture is …damaging and oversimplified … but definitely real. At the recent Newsgeist conference – a coming-together of…
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Brecht in Love
Who would’ve thought Bertolt Brecht would turn out to be such a romantic? While his newly released Love Poems are surprisingly erotic compared to his better-known plays, they retain that Marxist flair we know and love: Brecht’s love poems might…
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A Crisis of Peace
At The New Republic, Elliot Ackerman discusses Elizabeth’s Samet’s new book, No Man’s Land: Preparing for War and Peace in Post-9/11 America, “an expertly rendered meditation on a decade of war through the lens of the literature she teaches.”
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The Market Decides
In the midst of debate over Amazon’s place in the publishing industry, Margo Howard raises questions about the authority of its consumer-based literary criticism. When it comes to art, the retail giant’s capitalist-populist approach may do more harm than good:…
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You Are What You Review On Yelp
In an excerpt from his upcoming book, linguist Dan Jurafsky analyzes the metaphors we use to describe different kinds of food. Turns out humans are pretty optimistic: The Pollyanna effect has been confirmed in dozens of languages and cultures, and…
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The Neverending Story
For years, film buffs have been devouring companion material to the original works that captured their interest—deleted scenes, commentary, bloopers, most eagerly that much-loved paean to auteurism, the director’s cut. To accept this practice is to acknowledge the impossibility of…
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J.K. Rowling’s Literary World
A boozy editor; a powerful though closeted publisher who retreats to the countryside to paint naked youths; a jealous literary agent whose own writing is “deplorably derivative”; a much-revered but pompous and sexist novelist; a writer of “bloody awful erotic…
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Weekly Geekery
It’s time to shut down the comments section. And all the writers around the world rejoice. Jerkology 101: The science of sorting out your social life. E-books you can fold. Techy the Slate writer says, “Only you can prevent the…
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Rumpus Round-Up: All the Abramson News Fit to Print
Jill Abramson, the first woman to head the New York Times as executive editor, was abruptly fired Wednesday and replaced by managing editor Dean Baquet. The New Yorker attempted to explain why, with the leading theory being Abramson’s discovery several…
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The Personal Becomes Public
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s magnum-opus, My Struggle, is an unflinching and exhaustive chronicle of a modern life. Interviews with the Norwegian writer are equally as vulnerable and exacting: It is too late to shield himself. For all the success of My Struggle, Knausgaard speaks of…
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The Ex-Nazi Poet You’ve Never Heard Of
Prussian poet Gottfried Benn landed on the wrong side of history, supporting Hitler’s government in the early 1930s when it promised solutions to the global economic collapse. But by 1934, his allegiance to the regime ended as it became clear…