Stories
Book Review: February House by Sherill Tippins (and W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers and Gypsy Rose Lee)
It’s 1940. The United States hasn’t yet entered the Second World War, but artists and writers have been fleeing Europe ahead of Hitler, many to New York, some to a shabby house in Brooklyn leased by a magazine editor who knows everybody. There, at 7 Middagh Street, you might find English poet W.H. Auden keeping […]
Book Review: Custodians of Wonder by Eliot Stein
The last nightwatchman in Scandinavia climbs 14 flights of stairs every night to his nook above the belfry of a 13th century church in the Swedish town of Ystad. Roland Borg is in his mid-seventies, and for almost 60 years he has kept watch on Ystad, scanning its ancient streets for fires, its stores for […]
The Infinite Pile of New Yorkers
On my first birthday after my husband and I got married, my mother-in-law gave me a subscription to The New Yorker. It was a thoughtful present to give a bookish new daughter-in-law, someone determined to be a writer, even though I’d only published two or three short stories in literary magazines. Maybe Mary thought that giving […]
Book Review: One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
Writer Taffy Brodsesser-Akner has a question. A friend asks if she’ll interview her father, a Holocaust survivor who’s been given a terminal cancer diagnosis. The friend has asked before, and Brodesser-Akner has repeatedly refused. After being battered by stories of genocide at her Jewish high school, she’s decided she’s going to push her preoccupation with […]
The Holocaust, and how one writer faces it
Two writers whose work I admire. Two pieces about genocide: a book written by a man with a complicated Middle Eastern-immigrant background, and an article by a Jewish woman born in the U.S. Both centre on the author’s own people and the great evils perpetrated against them. Both are written in great upset and outrage, […]
Book Review(s): Tanya Talaga’s The Knowing and Omar El Akkad
One of the first words I learned when I moved to Mexico was gente. The English translation is “people,” and you often hear Mexicans talking about mi gente. For those who don’t speak Spanish, it’s pronounced “me hen-tay” and it means “my people.” I usually heard it as a fond word, an embrace, although it could sometimes be […]
How to keep a notebook. Or how I do.
“It’s okay,” a guy tells his dog. “It’s all right, buddy.” “Is everyone feeling weird today?” another man asks him. “It’s the atmosphere,” the dog guy says. “What does that mean?” “We’re victims of the chem trails in the sky.” That’s something I wrote in one of the notebooks I always carry. Sometimes I use […]
Film Review: The Return of the G’psgolox Pole
The documentary opens with a pan up a totem pole in a Swedish museum, far away from where it was carved in the 19th century on the northwest coast of Canada. The historic pole is shackled by a collar and suspended—imprisoned—in wires. The symbolism reverberates through the film, which I stumbled on while I was searching […]
Old friends and new connections: a small memoir
I had a friend in high school, a guy I never saw afterward, although I always thought fondly and vaguely that we might eventually meet again. Then one day I got a high school update saying that Derek had suffered a stroke. He had lived with the after-effects for several years but had died not […]
The use of AI in publishing vs. Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning approach to writing
What is the future of publishing in a world of artificial intelligence? (What’s the future of anything these days?) Will Anderson of Penguin Random House in New York says he sees two things: better written non-fiction books and novels more centred on feelings. In other words, non-fiction books written with the assistance of AI models […]
Altman versus Zuckerberg: getting one AI model to diss another
It was a boring business day. So I pivoted, and had tons of fun pitting Sam Altman’s Chat GPT against Mark Zuckerberg’s new AI model, Llama 3. The issue: stealing writers’ copyrighted books to train artificial intelligence models. An Atlantic magazine scoop by Alex Reisner shows that Zuckerberg’s Meta operation is using pirate sites to train its […]
How to spin gold from dross (meaning ourselves)
I was about to leave the courthouse when one of the journalists intercepted me. “We’ve got the cameras set up outside,” she said. “Can you give us a comment?” I didn’t want to. I profoundly didn’t want to. I was emotionally exhausted after attending a series of hearings spread out over several months. All I wanted to […]
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