Alissa Wilkinson
Alissa Wilkinson is the founding editor of The Curator, associate editor of Comment, and on staff at International Arts Movement. She is the assistant director of online education at The King's College, where she also teaches writing. Her work on pop culture, philosophy, politics, and fine art has appeared in a number of publications, including Paste, Christianity Today, Patrol, WORLD, and Relevant, and she is a founding contributor at Filmwell.
Alissa harbors a not-so-secret obsession with cooking, farmer’s markets, and food policy; reads a lot of books; drinks a lot of herbal tea; and watches movies with her husband, Tom, in their tiny apartment high above the Brooklyn treetops.
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 control [...]
Continue Reading...
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 true [...]
Continue Reading...
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 person [...]
Continue Reading...
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 filthy [...]
Continue Reading...
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 in [...]
Continue Reading...
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 “1984” [...]
Continue Reading...
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 the [...]
Continue Reading...
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 something [...]
Continue Reading...
From TED: Mark Bittman on what’s wrong with what we eat. (Video.)
Continue Reading...
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 question. Sara [...]
Continue Reading...
