Lorrie Moore writes about her home state of Wisconsin and its popular Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer. Also check out the Millions profile of Moore.
Dispatch from Wisconsin
Writerly Q & A
We're pleased to announce a new feature here on The Millions, "Ask the Writing Teacher." Our own Edan Lepucki will now be taking your questions about all things writing related, dialogue, plot, point of view, or other elements of writing that might be putting a pickle in your prose. Send your questions her way at askthewritingteacher[at]gmail[dot]com
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Next Stop: The Perfect Book
"I don’t want to settle for distraction; I want to look forward to reading my book with the palpitating excitement of a second date with someone I’ve already fallen for. I want to miss my stop. Ideally, I’ll miss a few." While it can be easy to spot a beach, airplane, or cabin read, Adam Sternbergh's writes about finding the perfect "subway read" for the New York Times. From our archives: our own Nick Ripatrazone's essay on reading and writing on trains.
What is Poetry?
"Poetry is clumps of words that make people feel something," says Wendy MacLeod, in answer to one of Poetry's most frequently asked questions on McSweeney's Internet Tendency.
The Best Episode of Science Friday Ever?
Public radio program Science Friday has quite a lineup on tap this week: "Science and art often seem to develop in separate silos, but many thinkers are inspired by both. Novelist Cormac McCarthy, filmmaker Werner Herzog, and physicist Lawrence Krauss discuss science as inspiration for art and Herzog’s new film on the earliest known cave paintings." (via @maudnewton)
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The Great (Literary) Depression
"Ageists who want to fault millennials for the continual decline in literary reading are wrong to do so. Across the board, there wasn’t much considerable variation in the amount literature age groups read. Everyone is hanging out in the 39–49% range." Is America in the midst of a literary recession? According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 2015 marked the first year in 33 cycles of research that the percentage of adults who read literature had dropped below 45% to a dismal 43%.
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On Creativity and Psychiatry
Good news for you! If you’re a creative person, you’re “no more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders than other people.” Bad news for your family! If you’re a creative person, you’re “more likely to have a close relative with a disorder, including anorexia and, to some extent, autism.”
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