[Spoiler Alert: this post contains information about the ending of the play] HBO has long benefited from a reputation for taking chances on risky material. Some of these risks spawned culture-changing juggernauts like “The Sopranos”, while others teetered then rapidly fell into abject failure (“John from Cincinnati” comes to mind). While entertaining the possibility of [...]

One I’d heard of before. Three I hadn’t. Some were free at AWP; some were not. In each one, I found something that made me glad I’d lugged it home–either connecting with the words of writers I didn’t know or finding new poems and stories by writers I did. Two of these journals have stunning covers [...]

I lucked out, living in Hurumzi. I live right by a small, tucked away Hindu temple. As a Jewish-American woman living in a predominantly Muslim world, I’ve sometimes taken comfort in the “otherness” of Hinduism here, visiting the temple, barefoot, on my days off, just to enjoy the cavernous silence of its inner courtyard — [...]

I have a very bleak outlook on the future of education, reading, thought, and human experience. But I’m not an especially dark or pessimistic person. My view is colored by the rise of one thing, which seems to be steamrolling a lot of other things out of existence: digital technology. It’s not a new outlook, [...]

A young friend of mine who works for a hip magazine in a super-hip city recently Tweeted a negative reference to her workplace. A few hours later, her boss called her in to the office, and told her she was lucky to be working at such a great place, and to NEVER say negative things [...]

As I was doing research for a Contrary book review, I happened upon an interesting blog post by Norwegian author Stian M. Landgaard. Since the blog is in Norwegian, I hope the author won’t be too mad at me for producing a free translation. (Hey, I can at least do a better job than Google [...]

Last fall I finally got around to reading Matthew Crawford’s 2009 book Shop Class as Soulcraft: an Inquiry Into the Value of Work, a rich and compelling meditation on American education, “knowledge” work, and the intrinsic value of mastering a skill. While I have told a great many people about the book, which I loved, [...]

“Siri ya mtungi aijuae kata.” The secret of the water pitcher is only known by its ladle. — Swahili proverb Where did you learn about sex ? I mean, not just about sex, but about pleasure? My sex education happened haphazardly in hotel lobbies during Bar Mitzvah time-outs, when we’d lounge on couches after sweaty [...]

I’ve been thinking about truth-telling in first-person narratives in preparation for a class I’ll be giving in a few months to so me fellow MFA students. How do you follow a first-person narrator who needs to reveal something, but can’t or won’t actually admit that thing to himself? What does a narrator talk about when [...]

What a great name for a little boy. And for the title of Summer Wood‘s second novel, out today from Bloomsbury [no spoilers]. Chapter One begins with these two sentences: It was the middle of the afternoon, January 1969, and a half-hearted rain dampened San Francisco and cast a gloomy pall over the hallways of the [...]

I’ve been teaching writing for about eight years now. I’ve taught rhetoric, freshman composition, magazine writing, newspaper reporting, and cultural criticism. Here’s the thing: I’ve never taken a writing course, or at least not since high school, when I took only what was required to graduate. In college and grad school, I studied literature, art [...]

I learned of Miriam Hansen’s death the way most of the world did, from the New York Times Sunday edition. Hers was a featured obituary in the paper that day, one of two that got  full write-ups. This is a testament to the influence Hansen had on film scholarship during her luminous, 35-year career in [...]

I’ve been crazy proofreading the new manuscript, translations of surrealist poet Benjamin Péret. The translations themselves are very goo d, they’re poems, yes, if I do say so. My God, they should be. They’ve been reworked endlessly and they sing. But then there’s the intro, the opening of Americ an doors to this French squirrel [...]