Alissa Wilkinson founded The Curator in 2008 and was its editor for two years until accepting a full-time faculty position at The King's College. She is also associate editor of Comment. Her work on pop culture, philosophy, politics, and fine art has appears in a number of publications, including Paste, Christianity Today, Prism, Patrol, WORLD, and Relevant.
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 the Atlantic Wire – a steadily growing list of articles by writers and thinkers on their media diet. Completely fascinating.
From the New York Times: Ballet Stars Now Twitter as Well as Flutter. “Hi, I’m Devin and I’m an MRI-aholic.” “Once again I took 2 days off this week. My body is wrecked. At the chiropractor now getting fixed.” “What you didn’t know- fell in my dress reh. Fri, tweaked my foot, and couldn’t finish! [...]
From Wunderkammer: The Anxiety of Influence. Literature won’t die out. In fact, it’s indispensable.
From the Boston Globe: How to start an art revolution. The wishful thinking and the practical solutions both tend to focus on New York, the center of the American art world, whose high-rent lifestyle and fast-paced market can be as deflating as they are seductive. Artists talk optimistically of changing the city, and they talk [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]