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.
Good Friday Sightings By Makoto Fujimura Stephen Assael is a surreal master of reality, and re-humanizes every subject by infusing every portrait with a deeper longing for a world to come. The Grafted Willow: My Poetry Family Tree By J. Marcus Weekley In honor of National Poetry Month in the United States, a rumination on […]
If Susan Boyle can do it, why not?
From the New York Times: Is That in Your Job Description, Maestro? For making news in the staid world of classical music, nothing topped Mr. Robertson’s unplanned New York debut as a singer during the symphony’s concert on Friday night at Zankel Hall, the first of two programs during this visit. Stormy weather in the […]
Of Public Transit and Human Nature By Rebecca Tirrell Talbot It’s funny what you learn about others – and yourself – riding Chicago public transportation. The Danish Gambit orHow I Broke a Blood Vessel in My Brain By Kevin Gosa Want to play chess in the bathroom? CWF can help. The Ugly Path to Adulthood […]
On being an uncultured oaf (maybe)
From the New York Times: Half an Oaf. On the theory that a certified intellectual might be able to enlighten me, I decided to consult someone I know who is an officer of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. There’s no substitute for going right to the top. Here’s what the certified intellectual had […]
From the New York Times: Same Man, New Wire and a Secret Midtown Venue. The stealth preparations made the walk a compelling subject in the film “Man on Wire,” which won an Oscar for best documentary feature this year. While on stage at the ceremony, Mr. Petit balanced the Oscar statue on his nose; it […]
A great project: Tweenbots. In New York, we are very occupied with getting from one place to another. I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More […]
Baseball and Sculptures Could Mix, but Don't This Time
From the Washington Post: Nationals’ Sculptures: No Hits, Just Errors. Hanging from the ceiling by the food concessions above the first-base line, Washington artist Walter Kravitz’s four big, colorful mobiles, covered in wacky cutout ballplayers. I showed them to one baseball-mad informant — my nephew Trevor, who once helped take the District’s Little League team […]
The Small Things By Jenni Simmons Contemplating the diminutive can have a profound effect on our humanity, creativity – and parenting. Lessons in Talking with God By Greg Veltman In Sunshine Cleaning, characters learn to let go by moving outside themselves. Postmodernism, The Big Green Ogre By Jonathan Fitzgerald On Shrek, irony, Derrida, Lyotard, and […]
What is the basis of moral imagination?
From the New York Times: What David Brooks thinks on “The end of philosophy”. Moral judgments are like that. They are rapid intuitive decisions and involve the emotion-processing parts of the brain. Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this […]
From Slate‘s The Big Money:
From the NY Times Magazine – In Praise of the American Short Story. The near-simultaneous appearance of three new literary biographies offers a powerful and concentrated challenge to the habit of undervaluing the short story. The subjects of these lives – Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever and Donald Barthelme – all produced longer work as well, […]
Opera Grows in Brooklyn By Linnea Leonard Kickasola An evening of opera settings as diverse as a subway train and medieval England. The Almost-Rich Get Famous By Alisa Harris In Spoiled, Caitlin Macy gives a devastating diagnosis of the Upper East Side’s almost-rich. Lasting Art Through CraftAn Interview with Paloma’s Nest The second in a […]
Lasting Art Through Craft An Interview with Paloma's Nest
An interview with Caroline Colom Vasquez, artisan and proprietor of Paloma’s Nest.
We’ve had about seven months of weekly editions of The Curator, and it’s been a great experience. But we’re a small operation and always need more help. Are you a designer? Do you know a little about marketing? Do you like to write? Do you have ideas for future improvements and features? Contact me, Alissa […]
From the New Yorker: A Nervous Splendor. There’s a telling description of genius by Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher of romantic pessimism, whose work was well known to Ludwig, Paul, Gretl, and Hans: “Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target, […]
If you can excuse a moment of semi-shameless self-promotion: I (Alissa, the editor of The Curator), along with five other accomplished film critics and writers, am involved with a new venture called Filmwell, a website interested in cinema off the beaten track and criticism at the margins of the great conversation. We launched today, and […]
The New York Times, in conjunction with the International Herald Tribune, now has a global edition. From the “about” page: Combining the international reporting of The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, the Global Edition provides readers with a 24/7 flow of geopolitical, business, sports and fashion coverage from a distinctly global perspective. […]
From The Guardian: The joy of anti-social media. Social media have undeniably changed the way many of us talk about books, and encouraged us to do it more. Whereas in the physical world there may be only certain contexts in which you’d dive into a deconstruction of Dostoevsky’s metaphors, the virtual world provides round-the-clock opportunity […]
Get (Emotionally) Naked?Three Films and Nudity By J. Marcus Weekley In great art – great film, great painting, great quilting, great photography – prurience has little place. However, nudity for a great filmmaker relates to film’s sense of time: it focuses on the impermanence of the body, while at the same time reveling in the […]
From Prospect: Cut-and-paste writing. I imagine some may consider this cheating: reducing the art of writing to an elaborate game of cut-and-paste. But authors have long written quotations on index cards. My system simply makes it easier to move virtual index cards around. The old techniques of pinning cards on a cork bulletin board, or […]
From The Guardian: Book covers: the pictures that sell thousands of words. So the blurb must be short and punchy, and the cover must make a winning pitch. Ideally, it should display a strong, memorable image. Many of the titles in the AbeBooks selection fulfil this criterion. Associated with this data, from the Lost Book […]
From Wired: Beauty Affects Men’s and Women’s Brains Differently. In men, images they consider to be beautiful appear to activate brain regions responsible for locating objects in absolute terms – x- and y-coordinates on a grid. Images considered beautiful by women do the same, but they also activate regions associated with relative location: above and […]
From the New York Times:
That Kind of LoveAn Interview with Pierce Pettis By Tom Wilkinson Pierce Pettis is one of today’s most celebrated American songwriters; his songs, tinged with his Appalachian upbringing, have been called “profound,” “beautifully delivered,” “wry,” “sensitive,” and “an integral part of any singer/songwriter’s collection.” When Avant-Garde Becomes AccessibleAnimal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion By Brian Watkins […]
Nicholas Kristoff at the New York Times: The Daily Me. When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about. Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, […]
From Miller-McCune: The Slumming of Suburbia. To be sure, the low-income drift to suburbia has less to do with bucolic appeal and more to do with economics. Over the past two decades, the gospel of urbanism has spread though the American mainstream, Nelson and others argue. The young, the affluent, the professional class and empty-nesters […]
From The Guardian: Don’t get depressed: A writer’s guide to surviving the recession. 1.Write in English, British, or American If you want an international audience, however small, it makes no sense to write in Swedish unless you’re Stieg Larsson.
From The Economist: English is coming. The evidence points to the imminent collapse of the European Union’s official language policy, known as “mother tongue plus two”, in which citizens are encouraged to learn two foreign languages as well as their own (ie, please learn something besides English). Among Europeans born before the second world war, […]
From the New York Times: A New Paris, as Dreamed by Planners. Hand it to the French. Who else would pick an economic collapse as a time to unveil one of the most audacious urban plans in recent memory? Yet the 10 proposals for a new master plan for metropolitan Paris, which were unveiled last […]
To Kindle or Not to Kindle? That's not really the question.
From Inside Higher Ed: The Reader. A willingness to incorporate the Kindle into my routines does not mean abandoning print, any more than giving up the habit of inscribing my name inside the cover of a book has made me any less bibliocentric. The patterns of engagement with text – the levels of concentration you […]
From Miller-McClune: Will Critique Work for Food Most newspapers continue to cover the world of culture using freelancers and (in the case of film and television) wire-service copy to supplement the remaining staff. A few, including the Los Angeles Times, have inaugurated blogs on their Web sites to get arts news out more quickly. On […]
From The Guardian: Playwrights are more important than politicians. So why do powerful people mesmerise me? There is a certain bond between playwrights. I suppose it’s because we have such a strange job: paid to put words into the mouths of people pretending to be someone else. And our shared concerns as playwrights – finding […]
Staff arts & culture position in the White House
From the New York Times: Cultural Post at the White House. The White House declined to describe the position in detail, since Mr. Dale’s appointment has yet to be formally announced. Mr. Ivey, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said he expected that the job would mainly involve coordinating the activities […]
Karl Paulnack’s welcome address to parents of students at Boston Conservatory. I have come to understand that music is not part of “arts and entertainment” as the newspaper section would have us believe. It’s not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or […]
An interview with Brooklyn confectioners Whimsy & Spice.
Sweets with a Dash of Spice An interview with Brooklyn confectioners Whimsy & Spice – the first in a series of interviews with small artisanal businesses. We’ll Always Be Here By Alisa Harris Everlasting Moments is the beautiful story of a Swedish woman whose photography gives her hope. Peace Like a River: Make of It […]
From The University Bookman: On Brooklyn’s Side. many agrarian or regionalist (the two are often unfortunately conflated) polemics often neglect the notion of vocation, or rather they universalize the notion of vocation to mean only a back-to-the-land kind of reaction. . . Brooklyn fits even less the New York stereotype. My family, for example, has […]
More on vegetables in the White House
From the New York Times: Michelle Obama’s Agenda Includes Healthful Eating. White House officials say the focus on healthy living will be a significant item on Mrs. Obama’s agenda, which already includes supporting working families and military spouses. As the nation battles an obesity epidemic and a hard-to-break taste for oversweetened and oversalted dishes, her […]
"It's kind of like we all went overboard"
From the New York Times: Conspicuous Consumption, a Casualty of Recession. “I think this economy was a good way to cure my compulsive shopping habit,” Maxine Frankel, 59, a high school teacher from Skokie, Ill., said as she longingly stroked a diaphanous black shawl at a shop in the nearby Chicago suburb of Glenview. “It’s […]
Not the pay-n-go business model
From The Guardian: Down and out in Paris. We pushed our way through the crowded shop, Sylvia stopping every two seconds to answer a question or help a customer. The books are piled over two floors – the ground floor deep and open, stacked with new and in-print titles, the upper floor a warren of […]
Nontraditional galleries flourishing
From the New York Times‘s Bushwick Journal: Art Galleries With Less of a Profit Motive Flourish in Brooklyn . There are drawbacks to putting an art gallery in one’s living room, among them having to keep the floors spotless and hide dirty socks. But there are definite benefits, too: no overhead, for one, which comes […]
From the CBS News Political Hotsheet: Vilsack Adviser Predicts Vegetable Garden On White House Lawn By Summer. Vilsack adviser Neil Hamilton, the chair and director of the Agricultural Law Center at Drake University Law School in Iowa, says yes. “I believe that by this summer there will be a garden – another garden, a vegetable […]
From Seattle’s The Stranger: More Than a Bookstore. But here’s the thing: Even as people downstairs were fearing for the future of Seattle’s bookstore industry, Ravenna Third Place Books was thriving upstairs. Customers browsed the stacks contentedly; a group that gathers monthly to discuss science-related topics was sitting in a semicircle; and the store’s newest […]
Revolutionary Road:Marred Sophistication, Trapped Dreams By Sarah Hanssen Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Roadwas one of the most highly-anticipated and critically acclaimed films of 2008. Sarah Hanssen weighs in with some thoughts on the film’s successes and deficiencies. Art of the Theater in Adriana Lecouvreur By Linnea Kickasola The Met’s recent production of Adriana Lecouvreur was a […]
These two articles are oddly appropriate next to each other. From the LA Times: Artists are Losing Jobs Fast and Furiously. According to new research announced today by the National Endowment for the Arts, working artists are unemployed at a higher rate than other workers, and at a rate that is rising more rapidly than […]
Is a literary revival on the way?
From the New York Times: Amazon to Sell E-Books for Apple Devices. “A couple months ago a lot of people thought Amazon was slavishly imitating the Apple model,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of the consulting business GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies. “It turns out they have a different model than Apple. They are smarter than everyone […]
Via Very Short List and the Utne Reader: Some Writing Each Day Keeps the Doctor Away. In today’s overly scheduled world, researchers from the University of Missouri tried to figure out what’s the minimum time commitment that people need to benefit from writing. They found that people were healthier after just two minutes of written […]
America's Favorite Food Intellectual
From Mother Jones: Michael Pollan Fixes Dinner. MJ: When you first wrote the mantra “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” did you have any idea what kind of reaction you’d get? MP: Well, I studied my poetry in school, and I knew there was something about the way it sounded that made it easy […]
Somewhere Beethoven is looking quizzical
From the BBC: YouTube selects online orchestra. Video sharing website YouTube has announced the players in the symphony orchestra it recruited online. Two UK-based winners will join musicians from 30 countries to participate in a three-day classical music summit in New York City. The YouTube Symphony Orchestra will then perform at Carnegie Hall on 15 […]
Good food doesn't have to be fancy
From the New York Times: Food Magazines Begin to Consider Cooks’ Budgets. As the high-end magazines try to survive a shaky 2009, it is out with the truffles, in with the button mushrooms. “There are ways in which we feel it should change,” said Dana Cowin, the editor in chief of Food & Wine, published […]