April 3, 2018 Writers’ Fridges Writers’ Fridges: Sloane Crosley By Sloane Crosley In our new series Writers’ Fridges, we bring you snapshots of the abyss that writers stare into most frequently: their refrigerators. You are catching my fridge on a well-stocked day, and it still looks like where hope goes to die. Starting at the top, you’ll see the shelf is being colonized by sweaters. This is because all the cedar balls in the world won’t rid me of the pesky moth problem that came with my apartment. A few years ago, the Internet told me the only solution was to store my sweaters in the freezer. This I have done … but there’s some spillover to the fridge. If I was a bigger garlic person, this might be a problem. But you’ll be relieved to know I smell okay. To the left are, quite obviously, eggs. And to the left of those … I don’t know what that is. “Can you keep a secret? So can I!” says the take-out box. Read More
April 2, 2018 On Television A Reckoning with Reality (TV) By Lucas Mann Lucas Mann’s love letter to his wife—and to the jacked-up emotions of reality TV. When we were first getting into The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, the husband of one of the show’s stars, who had seemed to be a real asshole (like potentially abusive) on-screen, hanged himself. The following season, his widow was back, shocked yet resilient, weepy but still game. At the height of The Real Housewives of New Jersey (your favorite), Teresa went to jail for the mail, wire, and bank fraud that had funded the lifestyle she so proudly flaunted for the cameras. Her special return-home episode airs next month. In the middle of our Here Comes Honey Boo Boo obsession, Honey Boo Boo’s mother’s boyfriend got arrested for rape, child molestation, aggravated child molestation, and aggravated sexual assault battery against Honey Boo Boo’s sister. The show got canceled, but Honey Boo Boo did appear in a special obesity episode of The Doctors, and now her mother is on Marriage Boot Camp. After we watched the first three seasons of 19 Kids and Counting, the scandal broke about the oldest of the nineteen molesting his sisters and avoiding prosecution by being sent to some backward-ass Christian labor camp. Jim Bob, the patriarch, vowed they’d be back soon, putting complete confidence in God’s plan. I’m not really sure what to do with all this; I’m just getting a list going. The obvious question to bring up here is: Are we complicit? “We” meaning you and me but also, in that awful think-piecey way, standing in for the culture. Read More
April 2, 2018 In Memoriam Drue Heinz, 1915–2018 By The Paris Review We were sad to learn that Drue Heinz, who served as the publisher of The Paris Review from 1993 to 2007, died last Friday, in Lasswade, Scotland. She was 103. Heinz was a lifelong patron of the literary arts, cofounding Ecco Press and serving as an active board member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MacDowell Colony, the Pierpont Morgan Library, the American Academy in Rome, and the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art. Read More
April 2, 2018 Arts & Culture Shakespeare’s Twitter Account By Kate Dwyer On February 13, just after midnight, the Daily Kerouac Twitter account tweeted, “As I’m writing this, the radio says there’s a foot of snow falling on Long Island.” A Twitter user named Susan replied, “Turn off the radio, go outside and listen to the snow.” As I read the exchange, I happened to be less than a mile from Kerouac’s home in Northport, New York, where, on February 13, it was not snowing. The conversation seemed suspended somewhere between now and the early 1960s, when Kerouac first wrote the lines in a letter to Allen Ginsberg. I couldn’t help but picture some version of Kerouac sitting at his typewriter receiving Susan’s reply on an iPhone. It was a bizarre sensation. Daily Kerouac is one of several literary tribute Twitter accounts devoted to tweeting quotes from authors. Sometimes these quotes are consecutive sentences from longer works, other times they’re non-sequitur snippets chopped off midsentence. Shakespeare has at least three tribute accounts, the largest of which, @Wwm_Shakespeare, boasts 158,000 followers. The most popular Oscar Wilde account has upward of 160,000 followers while Sylvia Plath has nearly 200,000 and @_harukimurakami clocks in at 235,000. I have a personal fondness for the Frank O’Hara account. There’s a Virginia Woolf bot that tweets quotes in Korean and a Lovecraft bot that tweets in French. And there are mash-up accounts like @WhitmanFML, which uses an algorithm to combine Whitman quotes with random tweets hashtagged #FML (short for f*ck my life), resulting in tweets such as, “When the psalm sings instead of the singer but i only have the ugly pieces left of the bread #fml.” Some of these accounts are run by living people who carefully select quotes that rhyme with the outside world, and some are run by bots programmed to spit out quotes using elegant Python code. Read More
April 2, 2018 Comics The Teddy Bear Effect By Pénélope Bagieu Pénélope Bagieu is a French illustrator and cartoonist. Her most recent book, Brazen, is out now from First Second.
March 30, 2018 Arts & Culture The Nationalist Roots of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary By Jess McHugh Amid the rancorous screaming matches of political discourse in 2016, a tempering voice emerged from an unlikely source: the dictionary. During the presidential election and its aftermath, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary mobilized its large social-media following to fact-check political figures who treated all language like fiction. From explaining the meaning of fact to differentiating between bigly and big league, the dictionary served as a biting challenge to the new regime, winning praise for its pithy critiques. Merriam-Webster’s resistance to an administration steeped in nativism, however, is complicated by the dictionary’s original goal to create and preserve a monolithic American culture. Noah Webster Jr., the dictionary’s founding author, was one of the first American nationalists, and he wrote his reference books with the express purpose of creating a single definition of American English—one that often existed at the expense of regional and cultural variation of any kind. Read More