“More commas, please.”
Why We Can’t Respond To Everything
Are editors more accessible than ever before? (For what it’s worth, we list our editors’ contact details.)
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Literary Insults
This week in book-related infographics: a look at history’s greatest literary insults, from Capote to Hemingway to Faulkner.
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The New Monsters
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Wounded
“Maybe I’m not outraged. I’m exhausted and open and exposed and a lot of other people are too because we are wounds that get picked at and picked at and picked at one day, there won’t be anything left to heal.” At The Rumpus, Roxane Gay writes on the sexism and racism of Seth MacFarlane’s Oscars jokes.
Our young robot overlords
Looks like our robot overlord is going to be a 13-year-old boy: the Turing Test has been passed for the first time by a bot simulating a preteen, making history for artificial intelligence research and teenagers alike. “Our main idea was that he can claim that he knows anything, but his age also makes it perfectly reasonable that he doesn’t know everything,” researchers explained.
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Snapchats of a Native Son
“That has always been the unsettling irony of the carefree aesthetic. Rhetorically, it denies the full unpredictability of black experiences in America. It is a stereotype, albeit one intended for benevolence and created, perhaps lovingly, by black people.” Doreen St. Félix writes about the roots and ramifications of the “Carefree Black Boy” phenomenon.
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A Lover’s Discourse
This Valentine’s Day, break out the Barthes and let critical theory decide the shape and scope of your sweet nothings.
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