The Future of Shame and Hope: A Conversation with L.X. Beckett
Not all is bad and terrible and grim in the future. Sometimes disaster means change, and change means growth, and growth means a future full of cool ideas and good-hearted…
Thirst Trap by Jason Diamond
Bukowski imagines himself among the Rimbauds and Pounds, and that grandiosity is one reason he continues to attract fans—not necessarily readers—drawn to the image of the writer as the dirty-talking…
Buried Alive!
Being buried alive was one of the most common phobias of the Victorian era. Fear of premature interment in a coffin inspired the creation of the London Association for the…
Subversive, queer and terrifyingly relevant: six reasons why Moby-Dick is the novel for our times
But it is Moby-Dick’s premonitory brilliance that continues to make it relevant. Melville predicts mass extinction and climate breakdown, and foresees a drowned planet from which the whale would “spout…
A woman’s greatest enemy? A lack of time to herself
If what it takes to create are long stretches of time alone, that’s something women have never had the luxury to expect {read}
Ted Chiang Uses Science to Illuminate the Human Condition
I think science and religion could more peacefully coexist if we could agree that they are trying to answer different questions; science is investigating the question, “how does the universe…
The Future of Work: The Farm, by Charlie Jane Anders
Once, The Daily Argus had fact-checkers, copy editors, legal advisers. Those people are gone now, and in their place there’s the Farm.
A Meditation on Forests, Life, and Art: Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Fir Tree”
“The Fir Tree” was originally published in New Fairy Tales, Second Collection (1844) next to another winter tale, The Snow Queen. It was swiftly overshadowed by that other story and…
Why Are Men So bad at writing sex?
Male authors dominate the Bad Sex in Fiction awards, and it’s no coincidence
The End Of The World with Josh Clark
This episode of The End of the World podcast had me thinking a lot about a book I just finished, Knocking on Heaven’s Door by Sharman Apt Russell, the boundless…