the new yorker
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What Would Lynne Tillman Do?
It is nearly impossible to live in New York City without feeling a flicker of Lynne Tillman’s exacting presence. Over at the New Yorker, the indomitable Colm Toibin writes about the (equally) indomitable Lynne Tillman in the introduction to What Would…
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What’s the Point of Speed Reading?
“The dream of speed-reading has been around since long before screens were ubiquitous,” as James Camp writes in the New Yorker. Now, the much-discussed startup Spritz is promising to make that dream a reality with a technology that streams text…
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Go Tell It on the iPhone
Praise the writer’s notebook, and praise the evolution of the writer’s notebook. Over at the New Yorker, Casey Cep writes about archiving the daily details digitally in photographs, rather than on paper: Photography engenders a new kind of ekphrasis, especially when the…
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The Power to Transform
“Women are more likely than men to change form and style,” or so Stacey D’Erasmo writes in this New Yorker piece. Female artists tend to transform their work over the course of their careers, while male artists are more likely to…
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Wired in for Life
…the unplugging movement is the latest incarnation of an ageless effort to escape the everyday, to retreat from the hustle and bustle of life in search of its still core. Phones, computers, and tablets, once seen as a way of…
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Need a new dating app?
Funny Women editor Elissa Bassist has a very funny piece over at The New Yorker about the dating apps of 2014. This one sounds good: Unhinged Description: Disconnect from old connections. Designed for the dumped, the living alone, and the…
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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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The Culture of The SAT
Elizabeth Kolbert began to study for the SAT and found that achieving a perfect score is much more difficult than she could have anticipated. She reported that her “anxiety level was soaring.” As the year went on, she “started to…
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You’ve Told Your Worst Secret
Gordon Lish, acclaimed writer, editor, and teacher, is renowned for giving fiction writers the following advice: tell your worst secret. Lish encourages writers to put themselves at risk, first making themselves emotionally vulnerable, and then restoring themselves. Through dramatized confessions,…
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Discovering Someone New
You know that feeling when you discover an author that completely changes your life? Jon Michaud does. He writers over at The New Yorker about discovering the sole work of Breece D’J Pancake. “These bleak qualities may make Pancake’s stories…
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Amazon.com vs. The Universe?
In The New Yorker this week, George Packer covers what sounds like a battle between serf states but is actually the heated war between Amazon, Apple and the Big 6 publishers. He gives us the low-down on Amazon’s tumultuous foray…
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I Know Death Too Well By Now
In a breathtaking essay on aging, Roger Angell reflects on death. At the age of 93, he writes: “A weariness about death exists in me and in us all in another way, as well, though we scarcely notice it.” Angell has…