the new yorker
-
Writing as an Animal
“Can fiction show us how animals think?” Ivan Kreilkamp doesn’t think so, and tells us why in an essay over at the New Yorker.
-
What Makes A Writer Famous?
For the New Yorker, Joshua Rothman explores why certain writers reach “long-term literary endurance” and others fall into obscurity. What he discovers is that long-term fame often has to do with “regular reinterpretation,” which requires writers to be multi-dimensional and adaptable…
-
Speak for Yourself
Over at the New Yorker, Salman Rushdie looks back on an evening with Gunter Grass; they drank Schnapps, punked journalists, and had the best birthday party ever.
-
The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Michael Hecht
Poet, historian, and philosopher Jennifer Michael Hecht talks about Thomas Aquinas, Robin Williams, and her most recent book, Stay: A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It.
-
Ideas Perish
In the past few weeks, two bloggers have been murdered in Bangladesh for writing critically about Islam. Reflecting on the deaths of Washiqur Rahman and Avijit Roy, George Packer argues in favor of intellectual freedom: The problem with free speech…
-
O Adjunct! My Adjunct!
In the New Yorker, Carmen Maria Machado writes about the poor adjunct situation throughout American universities.
-
The Year the Future Began
Reviewing W. Joseph Campbell’s 1995: The Year the Future Began, Louis Menand explores, among other things, the different conceptions and strategies for recording history.
-
The Secrets of the Past
Over at the New Yorker, a journalist returns to what was almost the last town he ever reported on.
-
This Week in Short Fiction
It’s a week of New York stories. First, in honor of St. Pat and maybe too those of us still a little rocked by the Daylight Savings shift, note should be made of “Sleep” by Colm Tóibín, which appeared in…
-
The Middle of Things
Amending Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, Andrew Solomon offered advice to young writers at this year’s Whiting Writers’ Awards. An adaptation of the speech appears in the New Yorker.
-
Sappho, Who?
The greatest problem for Sappho studies is that there’s so little Sappho to study. It would be hard to think of another poet whose status is so disproportionate to the size of her surviving body of work. Over at the…
-
A Sincere Mustache
In some piece or other, early on, I said of a person I was writing about that he had a “sincere” mustache. This brought Bingham, manuscript in hand, out of his office and down the hall to mine, as I…