What “Gone Girl” Is Really About
According to Anthony Lane, there are approximately “twenty-one people” who haven’t read Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl.” I’m one of them. This past weekend, when I saw the movie, I liked it so much that I...
View ArticleThe Real Amazons
Here’s a story, told by Herodotus, about the fierce female warriors known as Amazons. Many thousands of years ago, a group of Greek raiders ventured into what is now northern Turkey. Travelling across...
View ArticleA Better Way to Think About the Genre Debate
Last month, when the fiction finalists for the National Book Awards were announced, one stood out from the rest: “Station Eleven,” by Emily St. John Mandel. While the other nominated books are what,...
View ArticleDepth on the Dance Floor: The Music of DJ Sprinkles
In 1970, when he was twenty-one, Gil Scott-Heron released his début album, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.” The opening track, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” was an instant classic, but the...
View ArticleThe Meaning of “Culture”
There’s something innately funny about Merriam-Webster’s announcement, earlier this month, that “culture” is their 2014 Word of the Year. “Culture” is the “Scary Movie” of words of the year, which,...
View ArticleThe Screening Room: “Review”
For a while, the filmmaker Dustin Guy Defa worked in a video store. To pass the time, he and his co-workers invented a game. Each person would describe a movie to the others, packing in as much vivid...
View ArticleWhat Are the Odds We Are Living in a Computer Simulation?
Last week, Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and other cutting-edge companies, took a surprising question at the Code Conference, a technology event in California. What, a man...
View ArticleA Spiritual March on Washington
What should—what will—protests against Donald Trump be like? I asked myself this question early yesterday morning while riding a bus down to Washington from New York. My bus left from Trinity Church,...
View ArticleWho Is Loving “The Americans”?
“Loving The Americans!” Nikki Haley, Donald Trump’s Ambassador to the United Nations, tweeted on February 19th—to which one can only say “Whoa,” or possibly “Yowza.” One user—presumably not a fan of...
View ArticleThe Claustrophobic Paranoia of Walt Whitman’s Lost Novel
This week Page-Turner is publishing a series on Walt Whitman. Previously, Jia Tolentino wrote about an unusual use of Whitman’s poetry at a drug court in Alabama, Dan Piepenbring wrote on Whitman’s...
View Article
