This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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Posts Tagged: Vanity Fair
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
...more
This Week in (Reproductive Rights) Essays
Our storytelling, the sharing of our necessary truths, is needed now more than ever.
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Blue, Blue Windows: On Writing and Helplessness in the Age of Trump
The brain in the jar wants out, you know. It just can’t do anything about it.
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President of Smut
Our country has always been ruled by and for the privileged, but never has this glaring injustice in the system been made so shamelessly clear.
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The Rumpus Interview with Rich Cohen
Rich Cohen discusses his new book The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones, writing book proposals, and interviewing rock stars.
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The Upper Far East
So much for the ‘glamour’ of selling pretty things to pretty people.
...moreSitting Pretty
With a flair for the both the juiciest and most humanizing parts of the story, Soraya Roberts over at Hazlitt pens a sweeping indictment of/love letter to John Hughes: Thirty years on, however, we’ve dropped the rose-coloured glasses, and our response to realizing he sold us out to suburbia echoes Molly Ringwald’s response in Vanity […]
...moreCaitlyn is the New Clint: Why Jenner Matters
In all honesty, I’ve been out of the loop when it comes to the reality TV star formerly known as Bruce. Too young to recall Jenner’s decathlon-winning heyday, which launched him onto Wheaties boxes and into media stardom, and having neglected to keep up with the Kardashians, I’ve really never given a moment’s thought to […]
...moreHumor: A Reader for Writers
Not one but two “Funny Women” pieces are included in Oxford University Press’s Humor: A Reader for Writers: Erin Somers’s “Funny Women #99: Modern Vice” and Katie Burgess’s “Funny Women #102: How to Read a Poem” (only women whose last names end with “s” were considered, so do not feel bad if you were unfavorably named). While editors Kathleen Volk Miller and Marion […]
...moreMixed Vibes
Erika Anderson writes for Vanity Fair about growing up on The Farm, at one time the largest commune in the United States with 1,500 people. She shares not only its way of life, but how — and why — her parents made the decision to leave.
...moreCritics vs. Readers
Critics don’t seem to like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, but that hasn’t stopped readers from buying more than a million copies of the novel. Vanity Fair poses the question: but is it art? The New Republic suggests this kind of criticism is infantile. Meanwhile, Flavorwire’s Jason Diamond thinks a bigger problem is the disconnect between critics and readers: […]
...moreRumpus 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 weeks ago that she earned less than her male predecessor. But Vanity Fair reported that publisher […]
...moreCapote Fans’ Prayers Answered
Buried treasure has been unearthed at the New York Public Library: six unpublished pages of Truman Capote’s unfinished novel Answered Prayers. They’re from a chapter called “Yachts and Things,” and you can read them in this month’s Vanity Fair. If you read the online version, you get to see Capote’s handwriting and strikeouts, but if […]
...moreSendak’s Return
Maurice Sendak’s got a children’s book out, which makes it a total of 30 years since his last written/illustrated masterpiece. This thirty year period wasn’t exactly silence—he’s been illustrating books, designing operas, etc., Bumble-Ardy just marks his return to a wholly written and illustrated production. Vanity Fair catches up with the illustrious author/illustrator. (via Book […]
...moreTechno-optimism For All
Jason Silva is working on a film, Turning Into Gods (trailer below), that is filling in the space between science and art. He considers their dichotomy which is becoming more and more important with all the recent advances in nano/biotechnology. This Silva-style mysticism discusses cures for death and designing human brains and more out of […]
...morePolitics Sunday
Gangland tours of LA, with one helluva waiver. In New Orleans, what happens when sex workers are prosecuted as sex offenders. A brilliantly written profile of a sniper. “(M)y grandmother’s feet were bound in China, and there were people here in the U.S. who said, “This is horrific.” And there were people in China who said, “This […]
...moreTom Wolfe Takes on the Rich
“‘Tarantulas’ was the term the late-19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche—steady … steady … some of us rich people went to college, too—used for those who are consumed by resentment. Unable themselves to be great men, they burn with a feverish fervor, expressed as righteous anger, to tear down the reputations of those who are. Nietzsche regarded […]
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