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Do Writing Programs Actually Make Good Writers Worse?

“Can good writing truly be taught? Is the traditional workshop structure—a writer stays silent while her peers lay bare her pages—good pedagogy or licensed cruelty? What people, and what size bank accounts, are allowed safe passage through exclusive academic programs? And, more importantly, what effect do all these factors have on the writer herself?” – The Walrus

Lessons From The Whitney Biennial Debacle

Andrea Scott: “Of course, the major power dynamic at play in this story is the one between art and money. For too long, patronage of the arts has come with patronizing attitudes toward artists—that they should be grateful for funding, no matter its source. The obscenely inflated contemporary art market—whose metrics are based on auction results, from which artists don’t see a penny—has created the impression of art as a playground for the wealthy. But the delusion that art is an oasis in which beauty is truth and politics are irrelevant is more risible than it ever has been. Art isn’t made in a vacuum, and neither is money.” – The New Yorker

Tracy Flick Is Not A Villain, And We’ve Misunderstood ‘Election’ All Along: A.O. Scott

“Somehow I didn’t remember — or didn’t see — what has been right there onscreen the whole time. Which is that Mr. M is a monster — a distillation of human moral squalor with few equals in modern American cinema — and that Tracy Flick is the heroine who bravely, if imperfectly, resists his efforts to destroy her. She’s not Moby-Dick to his Ahab so much as Jean Valjean to his Inspector Javert.” – The New York Times