At Full-Stop, Eric Jett reflects on the wisdom of a possibly apocryphal commandment by Mark Twain: “Never argue with stupid people.”
Gaining Experience
Our True-Crime Obsession
In a conversation with Jonny Auping for Longreads, Rachel Monroe discusses our cultural obsession with violent crimes.
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Writing is excessive drudgery.
Over on the Atlantic there’s a compendium of cheeky marginalia Monks and their scribes have scribbled into gilded manuscripts, courtesey of Lapham’s Quarterly.
“Degreelash”
What did we read in the Obama era? Christian Lorentzen has some answers. Apart from individual books like The Flamethrowers and The Art of Fielding, he comes up with some genres that have dominated the past eight years, including autofiction, works of trauma and fables of meritocracy. (You can probably guess where Leaving the Atocha Station ends up.)
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Oh Henry
Over thirteen years, John Berryman wrote his famous Dream Songs, composing his most innovative and well-known poetry while his own life began to unravel. In a piece for the LRB, August Kleinzahler reappraises the poet to mark a raft of new editions of his work, citing Randall Jarrell, Saul Bellow and other contemporaries in the process. Pair with Stephen Akey on The Dream Songs.