Medium spells out how to win a National Magazine Award. Your article should be over 6,500 words. (It also helps if you are a man.) Deena Drewis writes about sexism in our categorizations of women’s writing.
How to Win a National Magazine Award
Skirmishing With the Eminati
Look out, Darwin -- Wolfe's coming for you. Tom Wolfe's new book, The Kingdom of Speech, which we reviewed a couple of days ago, takes aim at Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky: "Like an industrial engineer who also makes bespoke dueling pistols in his shed on the weekends, Mr. Wolfe has made a side career of skirmishing with the eminati (his term) in an array of cultural fields. If fighting enlivens one’s mornings, Mr. Wolfe has had little need of caffeine."
Should I stay or should I god-OH?
How do you pronounce the name of the titular character from Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot? Is it GOD-oh or is it god-OH? Or is it a third variant altogether? While investigating the question for The New York Times, Dave Itzkoff has found that there may not be a correct answer, after all.
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The Vulgar and Beautiful
At Big Other, Greg Gerke reads William H. Gass's The Tunnel and looks at language, the controversy over the book, and how the vulgar and the beautiful relate.
Salon Culture 2.0
Though Franzen would surely argue (in great excess of 140 characters) to the contrary, the excellent introductory essay from the latest issue of N+1 lauds Twitter for "the very last thing to have been expected from the internet: a renovation of the epigram or aphorism, a revaluation of the literary virtues of terseness and impersonality."
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New Open Letters Monthly
In the new issue of Open Letters, "Sam Sacks tours the city with E.L. Doctorow, Colm Tóibín, and Colum McCann."
Book and Bed
Who’s ready for a trip to Tokyo? Sadie Stein at The Paris Review breaks the lid on a veritable Shangri-La for book lovers, a quasi-bunkhouse known as Book and Bed. Book and Bed is a bunkhouse-slash-bookstore that doesn’t actually sell books. Instead, they have a number of rather spartan beds built inside row after row of bookshelves. Their noble goal is also a simple one; to offer “an experience shared by everyone at least once: the blissful instant of falling asleep while reading.”
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Beautiful and Pointless?
Does poetry still matter? At NPR, Tracy K. Smith says yes.
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