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A New Kind of Judging a Book By Its Cover
How should we feel about Anne-Marie Slaughter and her cover story of the July/August issue of The Atlantic? The piece was headlined “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” a headline that did little to...
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Being Blocked in 10 Acts
My brain usually does that moving-a-mile-a-minute thing and I get an empty feeling when it slows down. Sometimes the empty feeling is fantastic, like when I’m floating in a pool under the sun. Is it a...
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Mountains of the Moon – I. J. Kay
[Viking; 2012] The multi-named protagonist of I.J. Kay’s Mountains of the Moon, Lulu (I’ve chosen one, like one chooses a slip of paper out of a hat), doesn’t like to catch sight of herself in the...
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Destination Partying
In August, I spent 15 days in Turkey and Greece and the strangest part of the trip was staying at a party hostel called Francesco’s on the island Ios. If cities create narratives for you as you walk...
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The Neverending Story
When a well-written book (or movie or TV show or poem or some other narrative or anti-narrative media thing — whenever I say book, assume this parenthetical is here) creates a vivid sense of a world,...
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Broken Things
Most conversations, or written diatribes, about technology work off an unstated and false assumption of technology in a vacuum: technology always working perfectly, technology always available. In a...
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Haunted Houses
Halloween is my favorite holiday for dozens of reasons including but not limited to: mask-wearing, babies in adorable costumes, the color orange’s month-long rise to prominence, alcoholic punches...
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The Sensual Part Of It
Technological determinism is the flawed and reductionist theory that technology drives social change, in a one-way causal relationship. Technological change is a complex process that is not just...
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Why Don’t They Just Leave? Revisiting THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE
The main thing is, why don’t they just leave? They, the doomed inhabitants of a haunted house – somehow always entering when they should be exiting, going in when they should be coming out. Why don’t...
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A Review of Warrior (Album Commentary) by Ke$ha
Have you guys seen this thing Spotify is doing with commentary albums? They ask (pay?) Top 40 artists (fun., Christina Aguilera, Pink, etc.) to talk about each track on their new albums. Ke$ha (or, as...
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The Dream of Doctor Bantam – Jeanne Thornton
In Los Angeles, around the area where Sunset Boulevard and Fountain Avenue converge, there is a huge building, the size of a city block and royal blue. This building is the main Scientology Center; the...
View ArticleWhat A Day Job Gives You
A day job. That vile-sounding thing. If you type the words “day job” enough times, they start to seem like a sex act. A sex act you do for money.
View ArticleWhen Panic Takes Over
Unlike those classic tales written to interrupt moral panic, writing from the panicked perspective is a terrible narrative strategy. It isolates the reader or viewer from the characters and doesn’t...
View ArticlePenny, n. (poetic play, played out in prose)
When a writer repeats words and phrases, they can break away form the usual way someone reads a word and make language have a different kind of emotional weight.
View ArticleVery Recent History – Choire Sicha
Sicha makes us remember those intense moments and the tangles of our lives, both emotional and financial, which is how Very Recent History gets under our skins.
View ArticleAgainst Grammar
Language can only describe our changing world if we let language change with our world.
View ArticleEvery Day Is for the Thief – Teju Cole
As much as I like reading Cole online, the experience of reading his work in a big chunk is sharper and feels more complete.
View ArticleA Writer’s Stress Dreams
I dive off the cliff after my computer. I catch it, but I die.
View ArticleKate Durbin
I actually think this is a highly existential book. For example, I think the ending of the Kardashians section is completely a meditation on death.
View ArticleWhat I Read Last Month (or So): Sad and True
After pages of solitary struggle, all of a sudden, I’m not alone. I was shocked by the euphoria the first personal plural brought out of me.
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