The Paris Review - Please Fire Jia Tolentino - The Paris Review
The author of ‘Trick Mirror’ discusses her writing process, her favorite Houston rappers, and how she maintains a healthy sense of self in the internet age.
FRIENDS, HELLO! We got a very simple, very straightforward email today. You can read it quickly, w/ v. little emotional investment if emotions are something...
Toward a Constructive Technology Criticism - Columbia Journalism Review
“This is a work of criticism. If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand the underlying purpose is positive. A critic of literature examines a work, analyzing its features, evaluating its qualities, seeking a deeper appreciation that might be useful to other readers of the same text. In a similar way, critics of music, […]
Why Are American and British English Different? | Word Matters
This week is all about spelling. Some attempts to reform it have succeeded. (You've probably noticed that words are spelled differently in the US than in British English.) Others have failed hilariously. (You'll see.) But we're burying the lede; our first topic is that word itself: 'lede.' How did it find its current form? Then, we'll discuss the godfather of American English himself, Noah Webster. (Yes, that's where we got half our name.)
Not Your Mother’s Morals: How the New Sincerity is Changing Pop Culture for the Better | Jonathan D. Fitzgerald
In Not Your Mother’s Morals: How the New Sincerity is Changing Pop Culture for the Better, Jonathan D. Fitzgerald argues that today’s popular music, movies, TV shows, and books are making the world a better place. For all the hand-wringing about the decline of morals and the cheapening of culture in our time, contemporary media brims with examples of fascinating and innovative art that promote positive and uplifting moral messages—without coming across as “preachy.”
This week, PJ looks into a theory circling the internet about who might be behind QAnon. The investigation takes him back to the beginning of the QAnon scam, and to the message board trolls who started it.
More than any other tech company, Twitter was invented by its users. That’s no slight against the engineers and designers who actually built the thing. It’s just to say that what we think of as...
In the late 2000s I was sleeping with all of my friends. This didn’t make me special; we were young in one of the several ways people move to cities like New York in order to be young. We were in general not doing much with our lives and so we did what generation after generation of young people have done in order to combat that particular circumstance: We tried to generate enough sex drama amongst ourselves that we didn’t have to notice that we weren’t doing much of anything, that things were harder than they were promised to be, that we had very little money and that everyone else seemed ...
The joy of the free-diver, the peace of the loon, the patience of the turtle, and a touch of the ingenuity and panache of the great sea explorers (a Jacques Cousteau or a Captain Nemo).
Tending my depths, plunging into seas uncharted, dipping into mysterious pools and emerging to share the treasures and tales I find there (and perhaps hiding a few treasure maps of my own).