Living with the Cloud
How did we come to place our faith in a symbol that is so ephemeral—all vapor and crystal? The New Yorker explores how the metaphor of “the cloud” is shaping…
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the new yorker
292 posts
It’s Real Dangerous
…the verbiage comes to seem obsessive: a compulsion to name, label, and caption which, in heightening the absurdity of words, strips them of their power. In an excerpt from his…
Justifying the Template
Too many stories about mopey suburbanites. Too many well-off white people. A surfeit of descriptions, a paucity of action. Too much privileging of prose for the sake of prose, too…
Away We Go
Over at the New Yorker, Caleb Crain tackles the ambiguity on the use of “farther” and “further” in contemporary writing: Farther or further? I vary them more or less thoughtlessly in my writing,…
The Rumpus Interview with Francisco Goldman
Francisco Goldman talks about the Narvarte Murders, Ayotzinapa, and the stories he feels most responsible for telling now.
Scarf as Signifier
In honor of the upcoming centennial birthday of French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes, Hermés is releasing a limited-edition scarf designed in his honor. The New Yorker will gladly…
Three Hundred Pages of Henry David Thoreau’s Cabin Porn
Over at the New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz takes aim at beloved transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau for being a humorless hypocrite, abstinence booster, and uninformed impugner of innocent jam-makers: The man who…
You Don’t Mess with Shakespeare
Shakespeare is about the intoxicating richness of the language… It’s like the beer I drink. I drink 8.2 per cent I.P.A., and by changing the language in this modernizing way,…
About That Kenny Goldsmith Piece in the New Yorker
We ran a blog post earlier today about Alec Wilkinson’s pretty crap piece about Kenny Goldsmith in the New Yorker which we characterized as “refreshingly even-handed.” That description is only accurate…
The Story of Vera Caspary
Michelle Dean takes an intimate look at Vera Caspary, the woman who wrote Laura. But there is another source for the character. The writing of “Laura” was a kind of accident,…
Making the Cut
In writing, what is not said can be just as important as what is. Over at the New Yorker, John McPhee discusses the art of choosing what to include and what…
Complicating The New Jim Crow
At the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh discusses a new provocative book about current racial tensions in the US. The book, Black Silent Majority by Michael Javen Fortner, aims to complicate the idea…