The Internet Used To Be Fun – Raise your hand if you can relate to this sentiment. Apparently more and more people do. My pal Rachel created this compendium on writing about the un-funning of the internet. “…here’s a collection of articles that to some degree answer the question ‘Why have a personal website?’ with ‘Because it’s fun, and the internet used to be fun.’”
Author: theslowinternet_1lm2xw
-
Mail Blog
Mail Blog – Cortney Cassidy’s print-and-ink zine “Mail Blog” is a blog distributed through the US Postal Service. You can sign up for free by emailing mailblog@mailbox.org. Receiving this non-electronic newsletter has added some much-needed joy to my winter 2025. More on Mail Blog in Cassidy’s A Soft Manifesto
-
Monsters
by Claire Dederer
Description from publisher:
From the author of the New York Times best seller Poser and the acclaimed memoir Love and Trouble, Monsters is “part memoir, part treatise, and all treat” (The New York Times). This unflinching, deeply personal book expands on Claire Dederer’s instantly viral Paris Review essay, “What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?”
Can we love the work of artists such as Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Miles Davis, Polanski, or Picasso? Should we? Dederer explores the audience’s relationship with artists from Michael Jackson to Virginia Woolf, asking: How do we balance our undeniable sense of moral outrage with our equally undeniable love of the work? Is male monstrosity the same as female monstrosity? And if an artist is also a mother, does one identity inexorably, and fatally, interrupt the other? In a more troubling vein, she wonders if an artist needs to be a monster in order to create something great. Does genius deserve special dispensation? Does art have a mandate to depict the darker elements of the psyche? And what happens if the artist stares too long into the abyss?
Highly topical, morally wise, honest to the core, Monsters is certain to incite a conversation about whether and how we can separate artists from their art.