Looking to Songs and Sermons to Structure a Memoir About Fighting for Black Lives
The adage to “write what you know” could be a meta-principle. We know it applies to the content of our writing: that we use our lived experience as a well...
5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week
Our F5 tornado of terrific reviews this week includes A. O. Scott on Werner Herzog’s The Twilight World, Brendan O’Connor on Jarrod Shanahan’s Captives,...
Kate Eichhorn on the Rise of Insta-Artists and Insta-Poets
In April 2014, Amalia Ulman, a recent art school graduate living in Los Angeles, started to upload images of herself to Instagram. Her first image, accompanied...
Founding the First English-Language Library in Gaza
In Gaza, repairing a destroyed house can take several weeks or months. Rebuilding a whole house can take years. That’s because Gaza is under siege, and...
When Sidney Poitier Went to the Moscow Film Festival
The Cold War and the contest of ideas with the Soviet Union were high on USIA’s agenda as I made plans to lead the American delegation to the 1963 Moscow...
How Section 230 Shields Platforms from Accountability for What Their Users Post
Nowhere is freedom of expression as safeguarded as in the US, and nowhere has online speech been more freewheeling. The First Amendment was already a high...
How Growing Up In the Digital Age Impacts Young Minds
Ryan was four years old when he started unboxing toys on camera in 2015. A few years later—assisted by his mother, who left her job as a high school teacher...
Annie Harnett on What Living in a Cemetery Meant to Her Novel
This week on The Maris Review, Annie Hartnett joins Maris Kreizman to discuss her latest novel, Unlikely Animals, out now from Ballantine Books. Subscribe and...
Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance
Six weeks later, you were dead. I’m sorry if that seems sudden to you, but that’s what it felt like to me. That’s what it still feels like even now,...
