the new york times
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From True Love to Ambivalence
Think your love of certain passages will never fade? The New York Times Sunday Book Review argues that perhaps not all passages will withstand the test of time. How much does age change what we love? If you’re the sort of…
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Absent Characters
People of color have been largely excluded from children’s literature. Of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, only 93 featured black characters. In his essay, “The Apartheid of Children’s Literature,” Christopher Myers speaks out against the trend of allowing…
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The Academic Writing Debate
At the end of last month, Nicholas Kristof published a piece in the New York Times calling for academics to come out from their insular bubble and participate in the mainstream conversation—especially with respect to writing. Joshua Rothman responded in the New Yorker that academic writing…
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Mark Twain Still Popular…In China!
Did you know that Mark Twain is one of the best known foreign writers in China? Neither did we. There is a well earned, and unabashed image of Mark Twain as the quintessential American author and for good reason. The…
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“Pop,” “Soda,” or “Heaven Bubbles”?
You’ve probably seen this regional-dialect quiz from the New York Times making the rounds on your social networks. You answer questions about your vocabulary and pronunciation, and it tries to determine where in the United States you’re from. But the New Yorker‘s…
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Bad News for Journalism
The shape of journalism has been changing rapidly in the past several years, but it still comes as a shock to hear that a media company as dominant as Time Inc. is bulldozing the barrier between business and news. According…
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Helpful Definitions for the Modern Author
There are a lot of terms writers have to be aware of these days. A lot of them seem like marketing words but they can come in handy when trying to explain to the non writers in your life what…
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Growing Up Homeless In NYC
Andrea Elliott’s five-part New York Times essay “Invisible Child” is a brutal but absolutely necessary read. In it, Elliott follows Dasani, a bright, athletic girl who, along with her parents and seven siblings, struggle through daily life in savagely underfunded homeless…
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What Jhumpa Lahiri is Reading
If certain books are to be termed immigrant fiction, what do we call the rest? Native fiction? Puritan fiction? This distinction doesn’t agree with me. Given the history of the United States, all American fiction could be classified as immigrant…
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The Greater Meaning of Goats and Gossip
If there’s anything worse than accidentally CCing someone on an unflattering email about them, it’s receiving an unflattering email you weren’t supposed to see. When Tim Kreider discovered such an email in his inbox (disparaging the choice he had made…
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Cabbie Poetry
“Tip the waitress or barman well, ‘cause you’re going to need their toilet.” Taxi drivers made strides this year at the PEN World Voices Festival. For a handful of weeks, a group of long-standing New York City taxi drivers have…
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Monomania: Why Writing All By Your Lonesome Kind of Sucks
Over at the New York Times “Draft” blog, Benjamin Nugent, author of Good Kids, breaks down the romantic notion that locking yourself away in the “primeval hush of the Midwest” is a certified boon to your writing. Instead, Nugent discusses…