Your Local Internet
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Technology, which at first promised global reach, could assist the local resurgence of abundant microcultures...
Read MoreObscene Talent
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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?
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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”
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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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