In 2009, VIDA started a conversation about the visibility of women in publishing. For the past three years, VIDA has published lovely, useful, but seriously depressing pie charts on the ratio of female to male writers, reviewers, reviewed authors, and bylines from many of the big literary publications: Boston Review, Granta, Harper’s, London Review of [...]
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 [...]
Violence against girls and women is the world’s most disturbing open secret. One out of three women in the world will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. Many girls’ first sexual experiences are unwanted. She was raped by someone she knew. He beat me, but I love him. Story after story of violence against [...]
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. [...]
If you haven’t heard, we published a mega-issue of Contrary this winter, with seven new short stories, led by Nahid Rachlin and Jennifer Givhan, and eight new poems including a trio by Amanda Leigh Rogers. If you received an email from us telling you an invitation to submit was on its way, or even if [...]
When we listen to our favorite musicians, click on a Youtube video, share a link, float on a sound cloud from one good song to the next, we don’t usually think about what it took to make that song available to us. If we’re at all connected to the music world, we might sympathize with the woes [...]
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 [...]
Books. Good old fashioned pages, ink, occasionally awkward cover designs, musty smell. Many of us love them, especially when paired with a hot beverage and damp weather. But forget the bookshelf you’ve carefully pruned for order, ease of access, and (admit it) to impress visitors with your intellect and taste- you’re about to go on [...]
Every few months, someone posts a rant online detailing his or her outrage over the plight of adjunct academics. They can be compelling, but just as often, they’re not. They may even do harm. To wit: the latest such rant to land at my digital doorstep was this one about Karen Gregory, an adjunct instructor [...]
In an Op/Ed for today’s New York Times, Arthur Brooks offers himself as evidence that cheap, zero-residence higher education not only works, but is a moral imperative. The moral imperative has less to do with the correspondence part of the equation, and more with the low cost that correspondence (i.e. online) education allows. See, Brooks [...]
Every day at around 1 or 2:00, I take a 20-minute nap. Usually I’m at home at that time, so napping is as easy as lying down on the couch and setting my cell phone alarm for 20 minutes later. But I’ve been known to nap sitting up, too — in my office chair at [...]
Wherever I am/I am what is missing. – Mark Strand Uko wapi? Where are you? It’s how most conversations begin on mobile phones in Zanzibar. The question seems simple enough. But it unleashes a litany of other existential and crucial concerns beneath the surface: What’s your state and who is there with you? How far [...]
In Hal Ashby’s first film, The Landlord, a young white man (played with smarmy aplomb by Beau Bridges) announces to his very rich family that he’s just bought a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The year was 1970, and Bridges was 29. After an awkward pause, his brother asks, “Are you aware that that’s a [...]