“Who cares if I really hate sports
And for work, he writes ‘baseball reports’?
It’s only one date
I mean, this could be fate!
Nope, nevermind, he’s the worst.”
Limericks for lost online dates.
There Once Was a Girl from Secaucus
Out There
Some writers find their voices by heading off to Europe. Others (like Thoreau in Walden) head off to the woods instead. At The Rumpus, David Biespiel writes about the year he moved to Vermont, and what it meant to see himself as "leaning into" his youth. Pair with our own Anne K. Yoder on Ken Kesey and the Oregon coast.
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Seriously, What’s With Those Geese?
Here's a Sunday poem by Elisa Gabbert. Maybe its first line will entice you: "What's with these geese always wandering / around by the museum?"
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A Tale as Old as Time
"In contemporary capitalist societies, libraries stand out as slightly odd. While people are generally accustomed to going into a store and having to pay if they plan on leaving with something – in a library this relationship is quite different.” From AirBnB to Zipcar, startups premised on the so-called "sharing economy" tout themselves as radical and disruptive. Except that another institution – the public library – has been offering communal property for hundreds of years.
Not that the circumstances are always ideal, as our own Jacob Lambert attests in his "Open Letter to the Person Who Wiped Boogers on My Library Book."
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Your Literary Superpower
Does reading a novel for a few hours make you feel smarter? You’re not alone: a new study suggests that reading novels heightens activity in the left temporal cortex, also known as the part of the brain associated with receptivity to language. The best part? The changes last for five days.
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No Shyster, He
Thanks to the efforts of Gerald Leonard Cohen, the world now knows where the word “jazz” came from, why certain types of sausages came to be called “hot dogs” and how New York got the nickname “The Big Apple.”
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Welcome to the Party, VQR!
Thanks to Jane Friedman, the Virginia Quarterly Review is really blossoming of late when it comes to social media and increased web presence. Case in point: these once-a-week poem posters on their Facebook page. Extra case in point: the sort-of-not-so-secret Tumblr they’re working on!
New Before It Was Old
In the past ten years, we've seen many attempts to construct a taxonomy of the hipster, which is why it’s refreshing to come across a novel account of the term’s origins. At The Atlantic, Karen Swallow Prior makes a convincing case that T.S. Eliot, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, invented the “cuffed-trouser urbanite on the hunt for authenticity.”
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Next Up: The Norton Anthology of Infographics
Now that they’ve announced the impending publication of The Best American Infographics, it might be prudent to revisit Reif Larsen’s classic Millions article, “This Chart Is a Lonely Hunter: The Narrative Eros of the Infographic.”