Word: writings
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...semester. Yet it’s almost halfway through the summer semester here at Beijing Language and Culture University, and my tabletop remains freakishly clean. Ostensibly, my monkish existence has a single purpose: learn Mandarin. To this end, we may only speak in Chinese, read Chinese, write Chinese for the entirety of the program; the punishment for being caught speaking English more than once is nothing short of dismissal. If any of my teachers knew I was writing this postcard, there would probably be consequences. Very serious ones. Moreover, the course I’m taking is part...
Theodore Roosevelt once lamented, "there is not any more puzzling problem in this country than the problem of color." More puzzling to us now are his conflicted views on race. On the one hand, he could write that "the only wise and honorable and Christian thing to do is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man." But as was common among whites at the time, his opinion of blacks as a group was rather dim. "As a race, and in the mass," he wrote in a letter in 1906, "they...
...about people that way anymore: we're interested in the specifics of their racial and ethnic and historical circumstances, where they came from and who made them that way. If the novelists under 40 have a shared preoccupation, it is--to put it as dryly as possible--immigration. They write about characters who cross borders, from East to West, from Old World to New and back again, and the many and varied tolls they pay along the way. Their shared project, to the extent that they have one, is the revision of the good old American immigrant narrative, bringing...
...interview with The Crimson before the event, Updike, 74, said, “When you get to be my age almost everything you write reminds you of something you’ve already written...
Updike made several jokes in this interview and at the event, making it seem implausible perhaps that a former president of the Lampoon and someone who drops one-liners could write a dark and ominous novel about a young terrorist...