Some days I feel I am haunting my past life; other days I feel my past life haunting me. A name, no longer spoken. Voicemails of my old voice, saved. And what is this “I” or “me” that does not include my past life, anyway? When did we separate? Where was the fork? Was it […]
Quotes
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Future of Reading, and What We Can Learn from Beyonce
FULL STOP: Today, we’re flooded with stories via the internet — on personal Tumblrs, Facebook and Twitter statuses, the abundance of magazines and newspapers that make their content free online. With so many narratives all around us, why do we still read (and pay for) novels? “Oh I’m fairly certain we… don’t any more. We […]
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'There are patterns in the language that are the language of suicide'
Back in the 1970s, as part of his own research, Shneidman asked a group of men at a union hall, “If you were going to commit suicide, what would you write?” The union hall experiment was, by contemporary research standards, ethically ambiguous at best. “You couldn’t do that today,” Pestian says. But the notes turned […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Stint as an Advice Columnist for Ebony Magazine
From September 1957 to December 1958, Martin Luther King Jr. penned a monthly advice column for Ebony magazine. The “Advice for Living” column addressed a wide array of subjects, from race relations to interpersonal relationships. Below is an excerpt from the September 1957 issue of Ebony:
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Creativity, and How to Start Over
MCQUEEN: Talk to me a little bit about Yeezus. The album before that one, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, was a phenomenal success. Did that wear on your mind when you went in to makeYeezus? WEST: Yeah! So I just had to throw it all in the trash. I had to not follow any of the rules […]
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Your Body Is a Composite of Other Beings
In recent years, research has shown that what people commonly think of as “their” bodies contain roughly 10 microbial cells for each genetically human one. The microbial mass in and on a person may amount to just a few pounds, but in terms of genetic diversity these fellow travelers overwhelm their hosts, with 400 genes […]
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What High Schoolers Should Be Reading
Natasha Vargas-Cooper eviscerates the high school reading list on Bookforum‘s blog.
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How Horror Stories Are Being Created in the Digital Age
‘Daddy, I had a bad dream.’ You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness — it’s 3:23. ‘Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?’ ‘No, Daddy.’ The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out […]
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How You (and Your Spouse, Your Children and Your Therapist) Get Targeted When You Become a Whistleblower
“That’s what I’ve been talking about in earlier answers: the ability of the government to go back to taps collected years earlier to look for material with which to influence potential witnesses in the present. (See their interest in the allegation that the wife of one journalist may have been accused of shoplifting in her […]
Posted inPodcasts, Quotes
How to Cure Reader's Block
Of course now there are books on tape so people who have trouble with their eyes in any way — having the book come in through the eyes — have an alternative. I would say another alternative is to try an author who works very slowly on the sentence level. Some examples are Samuel Beckett, […]