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Extreme Isolation
Guest post by James Arthur Several years ago, I had a brief, obsessive relationship with Winged Migration, a 98-minute documentary about birds, and I went to see it three times in theaters around Seattle. To my outrage, every time I saw the movie, there were people in the audience who seemed to talk through all…
The Best Story I Read in a Lit Mag This Week: “The Operating System” by Carol LaHines
This week after reading “The Operating System” by Carol LaHines, I tried to think of the last time I made a big mistake—or thought I did—and was forced to wait out the consequences. Our minds do strange work when we need an answer and aren’t allowed to have it. Our desire to know is so…
The Ploughshares Round-down: The Problem with Literary Doomsday Laments
We who love literature face an urgent crisis: a gruesome epidemic of articles worrying over the demise of literature, reading, English Departments, and apparently (along with them) culture, art, morality, humanity, and ALL KNOWLEDGE AND CIVILIZATION. We’re in dire need of an antidote for this doom–prophesying fever, these impassioned warnings about “philistinism.” (A word that, btw, needs to please hit a wall and slide…