the new yorker
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What You Rupture, I Will Mend
I wanted that plate. Lifting it up, I held it in my hands. Then, opening up my fingers, I let it drop. It fell with a sharp crash and smashed into three chunks… My mother recognized my handiwork. She cried…
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WWNBD: What Would Nellie Bly Do?
Two things: First, Alice Gregory’s fascinating account of Nellie Bly’s bold, perennially wry career in journalism—an account that wraps up with a call for female writers to not only write about “women’s issues.” Second, Ann Friedman responds with a thoughtful defense of making a…
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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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Meet the Internet Bard
Steven Roggenbuck has been producing poetry “that is made, distributed, and viewed almost exclusively on the Web” since 2010. In this article in the New Yorker, Kenneth Goldsmith calls Roggenbuck’s videos, with their shaky camerawork and rough jump cuts, “meticulously…
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The People You Want to Share Your Brain With
“Why are you so interested in MFAs and whether they’re a good idea or not?” asked Rumpus friend Sheila Heti, in a recent interview with the New Yorker. Heti, who did not attend grad school, believes that it is possible for writers…
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Our Voices Are Voices Too
In the 1990s, Junot Diaz enrolled in an MFA program where there was silence when it came to critical discussions of racial identity. As Diaz writes in the New Yorker, “Shit, in my workshop we never talked about race except on…
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Boa Constrictor in the Derby Hat
The Little Prince is one of those books which just as easily affects adults as children, and it’s hard to go long without encountering it. Still, the story remains a bit of a mystery. In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik tries to…
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Plunge Into the Dark with Open Eyes
Terrifying though the unknown may seem, there are benefits to plunging into the murky waters of uncertainty. In an essay featured in the New Yorker, Rebecca Solnit writes, “It’s the job of writers and explorers to see more, to travel light when it comes to…
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You Are Invisible
Writing in the New Yorker about the smartphone app Cloak, Mark O’Connell offers a thoroughly beautiful and poetic commentary on the ontology of visibility: By generating a kind of omnipresence—whereby we are always available, visible, contactable, all of us there all the time—the technologies that…
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Remembering Gabriel García Márquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude author Gabriel García Márquez passed away last week at the age of 87. Writing in the New Yorker, Edwidge Danticat reflects on his life and work. I am often surprised when people talk about the…
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I Cook Because I Love You
When my grandmother taught me to make banana pancakes, which we did every Wednesday night through much of my childhood, she would counsel “Hold the bowl” as I stirred, which became, in our letters to each other, code for “I…