Professor
Story Stream
The Unbearable Rightness of Professor-Speak March 25, 2024
‘All happy families are alike—right?—but each unhappy family—right?—is unalike, or unhappy—sorry—in its own way.” This is how I remember hearing the opening to Anna Karenina for the first time: punctuated with what I thought then was a curious verbal...
VICTIM March 22, 2024
Mr. Martin pulled back the curtain. But my real transformation began at Donlon. It makes perfect sense now. Donlon was a whole new ecosystem where I could hone my new superpower. In fact, it was in one of my very first classes as a college stu...
Percival Everett Can’t Be Pinned Down March 20, 2024
In February 2023, the news broke that Percival Everett would be publishing his 24th novel, James, a retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from enslaved Jim’s perspective, for an advance of more than $500,000. Some Everett devotees (myself inclu...
Lauren Oyler's Favorite Collection of Essays March 20, 2024
'The Professor and Other Writings' by Terry Castle (2010)This collection of memoiristic critical essays is by far my most successful book recommendation. It includes a hilarious portrait of Susan Sontag — "Ours was on-again, off-again, semi-friendshi...
An Interview With Rita Bullwinkel March 20, 2024
Rita Bullwinkel is the author of Belly Up, a story collection that won the Believer Book Award. The winner of a 2022 Whiting Award, she is the editor of McSweeney’s Quarterly, a contributing editor at NOON, and an Assistant Professor of English at Un...
Harvard Tramples the Truth March 12, 2024
I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to ...
Is Black Trauma Porn Over? March 12, 2024
Monk Ellison, a struggling black college professor, writes My Pafology as a prank: the stereotype-laden novel is a clapback at the publishers who equate “Black stories” with tropes of poverty, brutality, and violence.But the joke, as it turns out, is...
How Pseudo-Intellectualism Ruined Journalism March 11, 2024
I was sitting across from the professor as she went over my latest piece. This was 1986, Columbia School of Journalism, Reporting and Writing I, the program’s core course. At one point, in response to what I don’t recall, I said, “That doesn’t bode w...
A Conservative Liberal March 07, 2024
Jennifer Burns’s biography, Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, will be the standard reference for anyone wanting to dive deeply into the life of the great economist and the world in which he flourished. The historical context that Burns provides...
