The Women Who Write: Michelle Dean’s Sharp
A review of Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion by Michelle Dean (Grove Atlantic).
This critical history is a rogues’ gallery of literary femaleness – even though most of the women in it rightly bristled at being defined as “woman writers.” Dean’s exemplars are, in chapter if not birth order, Dorothy Parker; Rebecca West; Hannah Arendt; Mary McCarthy; Susan Sontag; Pauline Kael; Joan Didion; Nora Ephron; Renata Adler; and Janet Malcolm. Most have at least a few things in common. While some doubled as novelists, all are distinguished for their non-fiction, with fully half reaching eminence via The New Yorker.
The Civility Debate Has Reached Peak Stupidity
The depth to which the level of political and social discourse has sunk in the U.S. has prompted both sides to call for a return to civility. Here’s one writer’s opinion on the topic.
Five Features of Better Arguments
Here are some suggestions on how to deal with the problem of civility in public discourse.
A former Clinton administration official studied how to facilitate more constructive arguments among Americans. These are his conclusions.
The Neuroscience of Pain
For scientists, pain has long presented an intractable problem: it is a physiological process, just like breathing or digestion, and yet it is inherently, stubbornly subjective—only you feel your pain. It is also a notoriously hard experience to convey accurately to others.
A report on scientists’ efforts to find “ways to capture the experience [of pain] in quantifiable, objective data.”
© 2018 by Mary Daniels Brown