All posts filed under: Literature

Headline Rhymes

Published by Graham Verdon

To hell with what we learned from the hero of Mockingbird, the preeminent Mr. Finch Believe Women dictates Tom’s guilty of rape and Atticus must also be lynched Views on the news, delivered in twos. This week’s inspired by two columns in National Review and: On the Fallibility of Memory and the Importance of Evidence How An Anonymous Accusation Derailed My Life Click for last week’s edition. More on Twitter @grahamverdon Do you have a Headline Rhyme? Take a stab in the Comments Section below. Please try for PG 13. Sentiments are not necessarily shared by everyone at Quillette.

Headline Rhymes

Published by Graham Verdon

Some say the sexes are biologically the same, like when you’re in the workforce or playing sports and games But men sure aren’t women when they need to be shamed and blamed, and men born as women never will be tamed Views on the news, delivered in twos. This week’s inspired by: Forget Nature Versus Nurture. Nature Has Won Why Can’t a Woman be More Like a Man? Click for last week’s edition. More on Twitter @grahamverdon Do you have a Headline Rhyme? Take a stab in the Comments Section below. Please try for PG 13. Sentiments are not necessarily shared by everyone at Quillette.

Headline Rhymes

Published by Graham Verdon

Climate deniers once topped the charts with all their sneering at science But biology balkers have a hit on their hands with their gender blender defiance Views on the news, delivered in twos. This week’s inspired by: Misunderstanding a New Kind of Gender Dysphoria Interview with Debra W. Soh, Sex Neuroscientist Click for last week’s edition. Do you have a Headline Rhyme? Take a stab in the Comments Section below. Please try for PG 13. Sentiments are not necessarily shared by everyone at Quillette.

Headline Rhymes

Published by Graham Verdon

Once, the butler did it under the parlour chandelier Now it’s murder by bad-wording inside the Twittersphere Views on the news, delivered in twos. This week’s inspired by: I Sold My Soul to Twitter. Now I’m Trying to Buy It Back I Was the Mob Until the Mob Came for Me Do you have a Headline Rhyme? Take a stab in the Comments. Please try for PG 13. Sentiments are not necessarily shared by everyone at Quillette.

The Death of the Author and the End of Empathy

Published by Heather Mac Donald

In 2015, President Obama described the Nation as “more than a magazine—it’s a crucible of ideas.” If it was ever entitled to this descriptor, it isn’t anymore. Academic identity politics may be importing an obsession with phantom victimhood into the business world and the media, but The Nation’s editors are now taking aim at language itself, reducing the complexity of human communication to a primitive understanding of words. In late July, the magazine’s poetry editors issued a groveling apology for a poem they had published earlier that month. “How-To,” by Anders Carlson-Wee, was an ironic critique of social hierarchies, couched as a manual for successful panhandling: “If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl,/say you’re pregnant,” the poem opened. It went on to suggest begging gambits for other presumed outsider groups, including the handicapped: “If you’re crippled don’t/flaunt it. Let em think they’re good enough/Christians to notice.” The poem, in its entirety, reads as follows: If you got hiv, say aids. If you a girl, say you’re pregnant—nobody gonna lower themselves to listen …

Cultural Appropriation and the Children of ‘Shōgun’

Published by Kevin Mims

This summer marks the 25th anniversary of the completion of James Clavell’s epic Asian Saga—six novels, totaling 6,240 pages in paperback, published between 1962 and 1993. The high point of the saga was the publication in 1975 of Shōgun. Set in the year 1600, it chronicles the exploits—nautical, martial, political, and erotic—of John Blackthorne, a British seaman who finds himself shipwrecked in feudal Japan along with a few other survivors of the Erasmus, a Dutch pirate ship he helped pilot. By order of publication, Shōgun is the third book of the series, but by internal chronology it is the first. It is also, far and away, the most commercially successful book in the series. By 1980 it had sold more than 6 million copies and become the source of one of the most successful TV miniseries in history. It was preceded by King Rat (1962) and Tai-Pan (1966). It was followed by Noble House (1981), Whirlwind (1986) and Gai–Jin (1993). Grady Hendrix’s 2017 book Paperbacks From Hell admirably chronicles the way that a single novel—Ira Levin’s …

A Literary Inquisition: How Novelist Steven Galloway Was Smeared as a Rapist, Even as the Case Against Him Collapsed

Published by Brad Cran

On August 8, 2015, a day after the University of British Columbia announced the sudden resignation of its president, Arvind Gupta, UBC’s Jennifer Berdahl, professor in Leadership Studies in Gender and Diversity, published a blog post in which she opined that “Gupta lost the masculinity contest among the leadership at UBC, as most women and minorities do at institutions dominated by white men.” Berdahl held the Montalbano Professorship, a position financed with a $2 million (all figures Canadian) donation from Board Of Governors Chair John Montalbano, specifically focused on “the advancement of women and diversity in business leadership.” Montalbano called Berdahl directly and accused her of making him look like a hypocrite. He also told her that he had contacted her dean about the issue. Berdahl shot back with a second blog post that accused Montalbano of trying to silence her. “I have a right to academic freedom and expression,” she wrote, “free of intimidation and harassment.” On August 18, the UBC board of governors convened a meeting to deal with the controversy. As Montalbano …

The Stifling Uniformity of Literary Theory

Published by Neema Parvini

In 1976, the Nobel-prize winning economist, F.A. Hayek, published The Mirage of Social Justice, the second volume of his magnum opus Law, Legislation and Liberty.1 Despite being widely regarded as the definitive critique of social justice, today one would be lucky to find advocates of social justice in the academy who are familiar with the name ‘Hayek’, let alone those who have read him. Among classical liberals, libertarians, and conservatives alike, Hayek is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century whose The Road to Serfdom represents one of the most powerful arguments against socialism ever written.2 But those in the academy who have perpetuated socialist ideas since the 1980s have practically ignored it. In this article, I will argue that this unwillingness to engage with the ‘other side’ is not only endemic in the radical intellectual schools that have overtaken literary studies, but also that it is symptomatic of their entire way of thinking which, being hermetically sealed and basically circular in its argumentation, has no language to deal with critics beyond …

With Stories Like These, Who Needs Talent? Part IV: The Sadia Shepard Incident

Published by Sandra Kotta

This is the final part of a 4-Part series of essays by the author, entitled “With Stories Like These, Who Needs Talent?” Part Three can be found here. The New Yorker was founded in 1925 as a humour magazine with an arch, self-consciously sophisticated, cosmopolitan tone. It soon evolved into a general-interest weekly with a focus on fiction, literature, ‘high culture’ in general, and what is now known as long-form journalism. Under William Shawn (1907-1992), who edited the magazine from 1952 to 1987, the New Yorker became the best-known, most prestigious venue for short stories in the English-speaking world. Writers still aspire to have their work published there, even though fiction now rivals the poetry as the element of the magazine most frequently skipped by its 1.2 million readers. Occasionally the New Yorker features stories by authors of genuinely classic stature: Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Italo Calvino (1923-1985), Alice Munro (1931- ), Sir V. S. Naipaul (1932- ), and – most recently – Primo Levi (1919-1987), whose “Quaestio de Centauris” was published in the annual Fiction …

With Stories Like These, Who Needs Talent? Part III: The Spirit of the Age

Published by Sandra Kotta

This is the third part of a 4-Part series of essays by the author, entitled “With Stories Like These, Who Needs Talent?” Part Two can be found here. Ben Lerner is arguably the most distinguished young writer in America, equally well-known as a poet, critic, essayist, and novelist. His oeuvre may be the single most critically-acclaimed, award-winning, institutionally-validated body of work by any living English-speaking writer under the age of fifty. Lerner was born in 1979 in Topeka, Kansas. His parents are well-known psychologists; his mother Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Anger (1985; revised 2005) has sold millions of copies. Lerner earned a BA in Political Science from Brown University, as well as an MFA in poetry from the same institution. He won the Hayden Carruth Award for Emerging Poets for his first book (2004); a Fulbright Scholarship to travel to Spain to write his second book of poetry; the Believer magazine’s Believer Book Award for his first novel Leaving the Atocha Station (2011); the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Prize (2011); a …