We like writers to be contrary, to stand up to conventions, to assert themselves in opposition to what is quietly and tacitly agreed upon “socially acceptable.” That is, as long as they keep doing it. When Alice Munro announced recently that she was retiring from writing at age 81, she said she was inspired by [...]
David Alm
Noah Baumbach’s latest film, Frances Ha, takes us into the world of a young woman a few years out of college. The effect is startlingly accurate, at times painful, and generally brilliant. The subject is familiar territory for Baumbach, who has built a career exploring the existential angst of young, educated, well-meaning people who were [...]
Dear friend, You know my pain, and that’s why I write to you now. You too have sat before a blank screen for hours, and hours, staring at a blinking cursor, feeling devoid of thought, frustrated, even depressed. Like me, you have never found the term ‘writer’s block’ satisfying. Writer’s block sounds like an acute [...]
Sometimes justice is served swiftly, sometimes not at all. And sometimes it takes 14 years, but when it’s finally served, it’s delicious. In an earlier life (i.e., my mid-20s), I was an aspiring arts journalist. And I did pretty well at it, for a kid from the Midwest who moved to New York with nothing [...]
What’s the difference between good writing and everything else? At the risk of sounding pedantic, I’ll offer this: specificity. You have to know what you’re writing and why. This doesn’t mean you have to know the exact form your writing will take before you lay down the first sentence, but at the very least, you [...]
What is it about tragedy that inspires us to write? I was in Boston two Mondays ago for the Boston Marathon, a race I attend every year. I’ve run it six times since 2006, but I decided to take a break from marathons in 2013. For the first time ever, I went simply to watch. [...]
I won’t lie: I’ve spent most of the past decade resenting Roger Ebert. I’d never been a fan of his “thumbs-up, thumbs-down” approach to something as nuanced as film criticism, but having grown up with “Siskel and Ebert” during the 1980s, I at least respected him as a knowledgeable guy. Until the summer of 2003. [...]
Virtually every high school student in the United States has been proselytized with the idea that book burning is bad. It’s on the syllabus: Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, typically assigned during sophomore or junior year, depicts a dystopian future in which books are burned by firemen working for the State as a means to control thought [...]
Getting published has never been a bigger deal than it is now. I’m not talking about getting “published” online; I’m talking about an actual magazine or journal deeming your work worthy enough to spend time and money committing it to the printed page. This has never been easy, exactly, but now that print outlets are [...]
These 31 perks of being an English major are by turns self-congratulatory and just plain funny, but they strike me as being just a few among many. And given that a lot of English majors also take film classes now, I’d like to extend the list into the realm of cinema studies. So with that in mind, [...]
Writers can be gloomy folks — no news there. But these days, as everyone from David Carr on down to kids just starting J-school are pondering the future of long-form journalism, they’ve gotten even gloomier. And for good reason. As Max Linsky, a co-founder of the site Longform.org, told an auditorium full of people at [...]
Credit for this video goes to Brandon Hopkins, who teaches English at Frederick Community College in Frederick, MD. Hopkins, who conceived, wrote, and stars in this gem, graduated from the University of Chicago’s Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, where he wrote an award-winning thesis that contained both a claim AND substantial reasons for making [...]
Self-professsed grammar snobs aren’t always elitist jerks who enjoy feeling superior for knowing more about English and all its quirks than the average person. More often than not, they’re simply people who appreciate clarity of thought and expression. And that’s a rare commodity these days. Maybe the punctuation marks we have are insufficient in 2013. [...]
I’m a sucker for bookshelves — the more packed, the better. I love to see towering wooden frames jammed full of so many books of all shapes and sizes that the shelves look as if they’ll buckle any second. To me a good bookshelf warms a room, tells you a lot about whomever lives in [...]