How self-help books have changed the way we think
The “self-help” book has changed how we think, and many readers are OK with that. Here are some of my thoughts on why. Over the last year, I’ve read a […]
Category Archives: essay
My productivity: How I’m staying sane when things get really tough
Two months ago, I wrote an article about how “wasting time” helps someone stay sane and allows for more productivity. I wrote this in the context of creative activities, like […]
“To my other favorite W. W.”: Walt Whitman’s poetic influence on Breaking Bad [Spoilers]
Warning: Major spoilers in this article! If you haven’t seen Breaking Bad through Season 5 episode 8, go check out some Walt Whitman poetry. Walt Whitman’s major work of poetry, […]
Why I love my Kindle Keyboard
Earlier this month, Amazon released a collection of new Kindles. One of the new Kindles is the Kindle Paperwhite, a front-lit e-ink multi-touch Kindle with one of the crispest displays […]
The Pale King in the Margins: Wallace’s attempts to find fulfillment and authenticity
The Pale King is a novel concerned with meaning and purpose in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Throughout the novel, characters grapple with concepts of humanity and authenticity. What is […]
A call for review writers
Wow, it’s been a while since I posted an article here, and I have a lot of catching up to do. That’s not to say that the last couple weeks […]
The Pale King in the Margins: Meta-Wallace
As I read David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, I’m reminded that Wallace liked to play with authenticity in narrative. Who is writing this novel? Who is the narrator? […]
On Reality and Fiction: David Shields’s Reality Hunger
When David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto came out in 2010, it was met with some strong criticism about the role of fiction. Journalists, litbloggers, and book reviewers were split over […]
The longreads phenomenon
Today I want to explore a trend I’ve noticed, and many people smarter than me have noticed: long-form reading is making a strong comeback online, even as writing online gets shorter […]
Reappropriation and ownership in the digital age
The most recent controversy to surface in the litblogosphere is Jonah Lehrer’s admission that he self-plagiarized several paragraphs of an article that appeared on The New Yorker blog “Frontal Cortex.” […]
