Alissa Wilkinson founded The Curator in 2008 and was its editor for two years. She now teaches writing and humanities a The King's College and edits Fieldnotes. She has an MA in humanities and social thought from New York University and will graduate from Seattle Pacific University with an MFA in creative nonfiction in 2013. Her writing has appeared in Christianity Today, Books & Culture, Paste, The Other Journal, Q Ideas, The Gospel Coalition, WORLD, Relevant, and other magazines.
Alissa lives in Brooklyn with her husband Tom in a tiny apartment stuffed with books and photography equipment. She loves sci-fi, scotch, empty notebooks, cheap ramen noodles, and getting lost on purpose in unfamiliar cities.
The Times, They Are A-Changin’
This month: The Curator turns two and gets a new editor.
Readers: We Need Your Hometown
Tell us why your place is worth living in.
From Slate: A terrific interview with This American Life‘s Ira Glass on storytelling, creativity, and being wrong. But there’s a really fascinating instance of what you’re talking about in Chuck Klosterman’s new book [Eating the Dinosaur]. I feel like this is a really weird example to bring up, but he interviews me and Errol Morris about […]
From the New York Times: A Rebuilding Phase for Independent Cinema. For more than a decade, the indie film movement centered in New York flourished, at times almost eclipsing the output of the mainstream Hollywood studios in terms of impact and accolades. But the financial collapse and the credit crisis had a deep impact on […]
An interesting infographic – which is emitting the most CO2 per day, planes or volcanoes? Infographic junkies who love public radio’s This American Life should also check out This American Graphic.
From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Bad Writing and Bad Thinking. They were a lively group of students, and we chatted for an hour, discussing topics we were all interested in. They asked smart questions. When we were wrapping up, I asked them a question: “What is your relationship to reading and writing?” At that […]
How do you measure success - in the theatre?
From The Guardian: How do you measure theatre success? A group of the UK theatre world’s leading industry bodies – The Society of London Theatre, Theatrical Management Association and Independent Theatre Council – have recently come up with what they believe is a completely new way of measuring the effectiveness (or otherwise) of a theatre […]
From The Millions: Every Day I Open a Book. Whatever the desire, I read so much that eventually my parents forced me to go outside and play, and they talked to each other—and I overheard—of taking me to a child specialist to see if there was anything wrong with me. And still I devoured books, […]
What to do about graduate school?
From The Chronicle of Higher Education: A Letter from a Graduate Student in the Humanities. Benton goes on to criticize both professors who offer such encouragement to their would-be graduate students, and graduate students themselves for their “angry and incoherent” responses to his critique. While I understand that he and his ilk may be trying […]
From The Guardian: Bedside reading. Celebrity readers always claim to enjoy only the highbrow, but real life bedroom tastes are a little more cosmopolitan. So no fibbing, what’s on your bedside table?
From the Atlantic Wire – a steadily growing list of articles by writers and thinkers on their media diet. Completely fascinating.
From the New York Times: Ballet Stars Now Twitter as Well as Flutter. “Hi, I’m Devin and I’m an MRI-aholic.” “Once again I took 2 days off this week. My body is wrecked. At the chiropractor now getting fixed.” “What you didn’t know- fell in my dress reh. Fri, tweaked my foot, and couldn’t finish! […]
From Wunderkammer: The Anxiety of Influence. Literature won’t die out. In fact, it’s indispensable.
How to start an art revolution
From the Boston Globe: How to start an art revolution. The wishful thinking and the practical solutions both tend to focus on New York, the center of the American art world, whose high-rent lifestyle and fast-paced market can be as deflating as they are seductive. Artists talk optimistically of changing the city, and they talk […]
From New Statesman: Notes on a Scandal. Clark made it possible for a chap in a pub to appreciate Francis Bacon, and Reich-Ranicki for a hausfrau to persuade her neighbour in the butcher’s queue that Günter Grass was a more important writer than Hermann Hesse. Kenneth Tynan and Pauline Kael added repertoire tips and quality […]
From The American Scholar: Sven Birkerts on Reading in a Digital Age. I ask my students about their reading habits, and though I’m not surprised to find that few read newspapers or print magazines, many check in with online news sources, aggregate sites, incessantly. They are seldom away from their screens for long, but that’s […]
From the New York Times: I Was a Teenage Illiterate. At the age of 26, when I returned to New York after an inglorious stab at graduate work in medieval history on the frozen steppes of Chicago, I had a horrifying realization: I was illiterate. At least, I was as close to illiterate as a […]
From The New Republic: The Adults Aren’t Alright. I’m sorry, but from where I sit, it ain’t the young’uns having notable trouble setting barriers and using technology with any level of discretion, reserve, or common sense. Rather, every time you turn around, an ostensible grown-up has done something monumentally stupid like sexting his mistress, sending […]
From The Guardian: Don’t Give Up the Day Job (a UK perspective). How does the average artist make a living? If you’re Damien Hirst, of course, you need only flog a couple of sharks in formaldehyde; if you’re Tracey Emin, an unmade bed will do. If you’re an actor, a well-publicised turn as Hamlet and near-omnipresence […]
From the New York Times: Why Orwell Endures. And yet for all his fame and stature, Orwell remains elusive. For one thing, he is impossible to categorize. He was a great something — but a great what? Scarcely a great novelist: the prewar novels are good but not very good, and even “Animal Farm” and […]
Human Trafficking - and Kijiji
A very important blog post about Craigslist and human trafficking from occasional Curator contributor Laura Bramon Good. I am in Ghana on behalf of a U.S.-based non-governmental organization that partners with Ghanaian anti-trafficking leaders to rescue these children. One of my Ghanaian colleagues is sitting at the helm of the red dugout boat, calling to […]
From Front Porch Republic: Local Bookstores and the Writers Who Love Them. That said, the confident positivism of business schools aside, it is in the nature of any historical moment and of any aspect of it to be unpredictable. Has a certain confluence of unanticipated circumstances made it conceivable once more that local bookstores are […]
From TED: Mark Bittman on what’s wrong with what we eat. (Video.)
From the New York Times: Taking a Walk through J.D. Salinger’s New York. Hey, listen. You know those ducks in that lagoon right near Central Park South? That little lake? By any chance, do you happen to know where they go, the ducks, when it gets all frozen over? There it is: the Holden Caulfield […]
From the Wall Street Journal: The Death of the Slush Pile. Getting plucked from the slush pile was always a long shot—in large part, editors and Hollywood development executives say, because most unsolicited material has gone unsolicited for good reason. But it did happen for some: Philip Roth, Anne Frank, Judith Guest. And so to […]
From the New York Times: Our Boredom, Ourselves. And yet boredom is woven into the very fabric of the literary enterprise. We read, and write, in large part to avoid it. At the same time, few experiences carry more risk of active boredom than picking up a book. Boring people can, paradoxically, prove interesting. As […]
The Miserable Results of Our Quest for Happiness
From the Telegraph: Those who pillage rich traditions for contemporary tastes take the easy but shallow route to happiness. This may sound paradoxical. All things being equal, it is good to be happy, and it’s certainly awful to be severely depressed. But what worries me is that our pursuit of happiness is leading us to […]
From the New York Times: Called Far and Wide to Touch Minds (a brief interview with Cornel West). I’ve never spent a weekend in Princeton. I would like to be at home, but my calling beckons me. I’ve got places to go, from schools to community centers to prisons to churches to mosques to universities […]
From The Millions: Year-End Reflections on The Great and The Good. A graduate school professor said to our class on Day One of our writing workshop: “The Great is the enemy of The Good.” I’m not sure if he was coining his own expression, or perhaps paraphrasingVoltaire’s, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien” (Dictionnaire Philosophique, […]
Better than New Years' Resolutions
From writer Donald Miller: Living a Good Story. A story involves a person that wants something and is willing to overcome conflict to get it. If you plan a story this year, instead of just simple goals, your life will be more exciting, more meaningful and more memorable. And you are much more likely to […]
From the New York Times Magazine: The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas (with a really cool user interface).
From the London Review of Books: At the End of My Pencil. For me, drawing is an inquiry, a way of finding out – the first thing that I discover is that I do not know. This is alarming even to the point of momentary panic. Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my […]
From the Economist: Suspended Animation. The longest bull run in a century of art-market history ended on a dramatic note with a sale of 56 works by Damien Hirst, “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”, at Sotheby’s in London on September 15th 2008 (see picture). All but two pieces sold, fetching more than ¬£70m, a record […]
Celebrity: Not for the Faint of Heart
From the New York Times: Tiger Woods and the Perils of Modern Celebrity. It is fitting that the hidden costs of fame should be exacted from Mr. Woods almost precisely 50 years after the publication of a book, “Celebrity Register,” that presented a new picture of social standing in modern America, one in which talent […]
From the New York Times: Story? Unforgettable. The Audience? Often Not. “You hear people of all ages, not just elderly people, say, ‘Stop me if I’ve told you this before,’ ” said Nigel Gopie, a postdoctoral fellow at the Rotman Research Institute, in Toronto, who has a paper in the current issue of the journal […]
From NPR: Picks for Best Foreign Fiction. It’s good for you. That’s the pale impetus so many of us use to immerse ourselves in foreign works of art. We should watch Bergman films, and look, we’ve got some in our Netflix queue! It’s just that Speed was on cable again last night and, well … […]
Hannah Arendt and the Public Space
From City Journal: Can the Polis Live Again? There is a close relation between the care with which a particular public space has been organized and the degree to which a feeling of community exists there. The activity of the market square is various, but its artistry makes for coherent and theatrically dramatic public space: […]
From The Paris Review: Poetry from a new translation of Rainer Maria Rilke. XVI. Fra Angelico, in his great frescoes of severe solitary figures, expressed the aspiration to heaven simply and beautifully in every one. But on the many, many God-breathing faces of the angels in the Last Judgment, heaven itself has its place with […]
How social networks influence our behavior and outlook
From City Journal: You Say Potato, I’ll Say Potato. Before Facebook, few of us asked others, explicitly, to be our friends. We didn’t monitor how many friends we had as an indication of our status or scroll through listings of friends of friends to pad our own list. Yet the history of humanity is a […]
An interview with Maya Angelou
From The Independent: An interview with Maya Angelou. During a trip to Senegal, Maya Angelou called Samia, a friend she had made in Paris several years before, and was invited over for dinner. Passing a room where people apparently clung to the wall to avoid standing on the rug, Angelou became incensed. “I had known […]
Zadie Smith on the rise of the essay
From The Guardian: Does the essay live up to its promise? Why do novelists write essays? Most publishers would rather have a novel. Bookshops don’t know where to put them. It’s a rare reader who seeks them out with any sense of urgency. Still, in recent months Jonathan Safran Foer, Margaret Drabble, Chinua Achebe and […]
From The American Scholar: Writing About Writers. She has never written from outlines, but she would sometimes think as much as 30 pages ahead. Not this time. “It didn’t feel like writing,” she said. “Writing to me is really hard. And I just sort of sat down and wrote this – or typed it.” She […]
From the New York Times: Mistakes in Typography Grate the Purists. Seeing the clean, crisp shapes of those letters and numbers at station entrances, on the platforms and inside the trains is always a treat, at least it is until I spot the “Do not lean …” sign on the train doors. Ugh! There’s something […]
From Foreign Policy: Why TV, not Facebook or Twitter, is going to revolutionize the world. Indeed, television, that 1920s technology so many of us take for granted, is still coming to tens of millions with a transformative power — for the good — that the world is only now coming to understand. The potential scope […]
From the Telegraph: The secret behind Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile. Now scientists claim to have come up with an answer to her changing moods – our eyes are sending mixed signals to the brain. They believe Mona Lisa’s smile depends on what cells in the retina pick up the image and what channel the image […]
Bringing Fresh Produce to the Corner Store
From the New York Times: Pushing Fresh Produce Instead of Cookies at the Corner Market. Until recently, small corner grocery stores were seen by public health officials as part of theobesity problem. The stores, predominantly family-owned, offered convenience, but the accent was on snack chips, canned goods and sugary drinks. Now, because they are often […]
From the Wall Street Journal: The Art World Goes Local. At the height of the boom, art collectors scrambled to acquire works by top artists from rising markets including China, Russia, India and the Middle East. A serious approach to collecting meant trips to London, New York and Hong Kong several times a year for […]
From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Confessions of a Middlebrow Professor. Unlike the independent highbrows and unself-conscious lowbrows, middlebrows, it seems, are so invested in “getting on in life” that they do not really like anything unless it has been approved by their betters. For Woolf and her heirs, middlebrows are inauthentic, meretricious bounders, slaves […]
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From The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Millenial Muddle: How stereotyping students became a thriving industry and a bundle of contradictions. Figuring out young people has always been a chore, but today it’s also an industry. Colleges and corporations pay experts big bucks to help them understand the fresh-faced hordes that pack the nation’s dorms […]
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