Alissa Wilkinson
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.
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 [...]
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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 [...]
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From TED: Mark Bittman on what’s wrong with what we eat. (Video.)
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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 [...]
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From the Wall Street Journal: The Death of the Slush Pile. Getting plucked from the slush pile was always a long shot—in large part, editors and Hollywood development executives say, because most unsolicited material has gone unsolicited for good reason. But it did happen for some: Philip Roth, Anne Frank, Judith Guest. And so to [...]
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From the New York Times: Our Boredom, Ourselves. And yet boredom is woven into the very fabric of the literary enterprise. We read, and write, in large part to avoid it. At the same time, few experiences carry more risk of active boredom than picking up a book. Boring people can, paradoxically, prove interesting. As [...]
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From the Telegraph: Those who pillage rich traditions for contemporary tastes take the easy but shallow route to happiness. This may sound paradoxical. All things being equal, it is good to be happy, and it’s certainly awful to be severely depressed. But what worries me is that our pursuit of happiness is leading us to [...]
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From the New York Times: Called Far and Wide to Touch Minds (a brief interview with Cornel West). I’ve never spent a weekend in Princeton. I would like to be at home, but my calling beckons me. I’ve got places to go, from schools to community centers to prisons to churches to mosques to universities [...]
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From The Millions: Year-End Reflections on The Great and The Good. A graduate school professor said to our class on Day One of our writing workshop: “The Great is the enemy of The Good.” I’m not sure if he was coining his own expression, or perhaps paraphrasingVoltaire’s, “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien” (Dictionnaire Philosophique, [...]
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From writer Donald Miller: Living a Good Story. A story involves a person that wants something and is willing to overcome conflict to get it. If you plan a story this year, instead of just simple goals, your life will be more exciting, more meaningful and more memorable. And you are much more likely to [...]
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