I have an interview up on arts/culture website The Rumpus today with author Dinaw Mengestu.

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Dinaw Mengestu’s name may be hard to pronounce (dih-NOW men-GUESS-too), but you’ll soon be hearing it a lot more. Earlier this year, the… Read full post »

This past weekend, I went to the annual New Yorker Festival, where the magazine rounds up its formidable roster of contributors, subjects and friends for a weekend of talks and performances. The five events I attended had sex, violence, music, humor and mutant radioactive albino crocodiles. Here are… Read full post »

One of my least favorite things about being a journalist in the era of 800 million news outlets is that you end up interviewing people who have been interviewed a dozen times before, asking them many of the same questions that all the other journalists asked them. I’ve had stories where… Read full post »

I have a friend who is translating The Iliad from Latin, for fun, and I have to admit that on hearing of his undertaking my first reaction was, why? Hasn’t that been done already, a lot? Yesterday The Paris Review’s blog provided a great reminder of the importance of new and… Read full post »

I have an essay on The Millions today about The Switch, the recent film adaptation of the Jeffrey Eugenides short story "Baster." (Eugenides is best known for his novels Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides, but "Baster" is a sharp, funny little story.) 

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 In 1999,… Read full post »

I have an essay published today at the literary criticism website The Millions, about my love for novels with precocious child narrators:

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In Dan Chaon’s story “Prodi/… Read full post »

Since I am an enthusiastic reader, there are a lot of authors with whom I would love to be friends. We’d meet at a reading, hit it off, grab coffee—and voila! I’d have a glittery and talented new companion who would not only tolerate my endless discussion of books and reading a… Read full post »

This post is also published on Jezebel.

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Christina Aguilera has always been my favorite pop star. From the moment “Genie in a Bottle” hit the airwaves in 1999, I was hooked. She was in the pages of my teen magazines, but unlike… Read full post »

The seventh season of So You Think You Can Dance premieres tonight, and man, that show makes me wish I could. 

I was a gymnast when I was younger, though you’d never know from the fact that now I can barely touch my toes until after an hour of yoga. I spent… Read full post »

Reading Michiko Kakutani’s review of the third book of Swedish author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, I was hit with a moment of déjà vu. There has been a lot of coverage of the now full-blown phenomenon of these books…… Read full post »

The WNBA season opens this weekend, and when the Tulsa Shock face off against the Minnesota Lynx on Saturday, a league that has long struggled to build a fan base will find a few more eyes cast its way—because Marion Jones is on the roster for the Shock.

Most people, of course, know… Read full post »

I love grammar and punctuation. In high school, I thought the standardized tests that asked you to correct sentences were fun. I use semicolons in text messages. My job involves proofreading. I have a visceral reaction to mangling of the English language. I don’t understand what is so damn diff… Read full post »

Some books just grab me, and I become one of those well-meaning, perhaps annoying, literary evangelists who tells everyone I meet, “You have to read this!” Such was the case when I discovered J. Robert Lennon‘s brilliant story collection Pieces for the Left Hand sever… Read full post »

Stephen Sondheim is having a heck of a birthday party. The musical theater titan turned 80 last month, and tributes to his work—which includes West Side Story, Company, Follies and Sweeny Todd—have filled New York with a little night music. The Philharmonic c… Read full post »

When I was younger, I was kind of a brat. Not mean, not cruel, not a bully—just someone who thought she was usually smarter than the other kids around her, and sometimes smarter than her teachers.

I also loved movies, but I took pride in watching good movies. When my sister and I/… Read full post »

On a night that Kathryn Bigelow made Oscar history by becoming the first woman to win an award for Best Director, another moment on the telecast made clear how far women still have to go in Hollywood.

Partway through the packed show, actress Elizabeth Banks highlighted the Academy’s Scien… Read full post »

Warning: This will get lewd. But how can you talk about the dizzyingly funny and wildly vulgar political satire In the Loop, nominated for best adapted screenplay, without language that would make Howard Stern blush?

In the run-up to the March 7th Oscars, there has been much discussion about pe… Read full post »

Yesterday, Twitter released a statistic that made my head hurt. Apparently, the site now boasts 50 million tweets per day. That’s 600 tweets per second. In the question of quantity or quality, quantity has delivered a resounding blow.

The March 2010 issue of Entrepreneur magazine includes… Read full post »

This post also appeared on Salon.

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In an article that appeared Wednesday in Slate, Hanna Rosin examines the fraught world of sexuality for female athletes. Her central comparison is between skier Lindsey Vonn, who recently posed for Sports Illustrated swimsuit i… Read full post »

[I wrote this essay for the new issue of the Pomona College Magazine about home and shelter. I'd love to hear your own experiences of moving out and moving on.]

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Don’t get me wrong—I think Lady Gaga and Beyoncé are two of the most talented pop stars out there. I sing along to “Paparaazi,” Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love” might be my favorite mainstream hit ever, and I saw a great Destiny’s Child concert w… Read full post »