Your Local Internet
Technology, which at first promised global reach, could assist the local resurgence of abundant microcultures...
Read MoreObscene Talent
Talent is like obscenity: you know it when you see it. It’s something that can’t be defined, only recognized—an irreducible and unteachable entity, like charisma or humor...
Read MoreRainy Cafe
To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world...
Read MoreEric D. Lehman: The Pleasures and Dangers of Private Criticism
Literary critics are an easy target, particularly for authors. John Fowles put it this way in his novel Daniel Martin: “However justified the criticism...
Read MoreTolkien in His Sleep
It is difficult not to feel that JRR Tolkien’s name destined him for philological studies and perhaps in the end for the creation of imaginary worlds...
Read MoreJoe Linker: AWP Diary
The annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) convention is being held this coming week in my home town of Portland, Oregon.
Read MoreInteriority Combustion Engine by Ed Simon
Ann Radcliffe’s 1794 best-selling novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, containing as it does all of the stereotypical accoutrement of its gothic genre, from perfidious Italian counts to dark castles...
Read MoreStaying Woke
In the late ’90s and early aughts, the word woke was a life vest. My parents and the other black people I grew up with used it to stay afloat in a Wisconsin town whose university once feigned diversity by photoshopping a black man onto the cover of an...
Read MoreDruid, How’s My Circle?
It’s a cloudy August morning just after sunrise, and my family and I are speeding about a hundred miles west of London in our rental car, bisecting the Salisbury Plain on the A303.
Read More“Autonomy made it possible for us to find our own voices”
Silvia Federici’s scholarship and activism offers a foundational account of the demand for the wage as a revolutionary act...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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