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From Sophocles to Twin Peaks: What Killed Laura Palmer?
One the toughest and most important jobs I have as an English professor at a small, women’s liberal arts college, is teaching students to write well. I would love to hold forth on Flannery O’Connor—my life-long literary crush—but getting students to care about writing involves helping them find something they’re interested in, not foisting my....
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The Evolution of a Beastie
I was in my fourth meeting of the day when I got the news that Adam Yauch had died. Most guys my age knew Yauch as MCA, the throatier member of the Beastie Boys, with a coarser voice and smoother flow than the nasal machine-gun delivery of his band-mates Mike D and the Ad Rock. He was also known as the conscientious Beastie, the one who organized the 1996 Tibetan Freedom Concert....
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Art, Facts, and Fabrication
Years from now, cultural historians, authors, and publishers will look back on the calendar year 2011-2012 as the year that attitudes toward the blurry line between fact and fiction changed. In early 2011 John D’Agata’s About a Mountain was published to much acclaim and hand-wringing. Those of you who followed the controversy over D’Agata’s admitted conflations and inventions will probably not even....
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Other Than We Are
The night of the battle of the bands, hell-bent on winning, we reverted to theatrics. Despite the stifling heat inside the bar, we bundled up in heavy coats and scarves, pulled on wool hats, and then processed single file through the middle of the dense crowd as “Eye of the Tiger” blared. At the head of the procession was our singer, holding a smoking bucket of dry ice like a censer. The deep pockets....
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The Infinite Monkey Meme
A few years ago I was eating breakfast with my wife and daughter at a hipster diner specializing in cheap organic food and strong free-trade coffee. We were surrounded by wild-haired, paint-spattered vegans and their wild-haired children. Inevitably, our daughter began playing with the other children and soon we were invited to draw up chairs and talk. They were all artists of one stripe or another and so I offered....
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