Devil’s Advocate
From the 1997 film by Jamal Stone The facts: Broad Street Magazine’s “Bedeviled” issue draws closer than ever to publication, Halloween is less than a week away, and The Devil’s Advocate recently has been picked up as a TV series by NBC. This raises a question: Rhetorically, a devil’s advocate is someone who argues for argument’s sake,...
Truth by Lying
At the banquet for his Nobel Prize for literature in 2003, J.M. Coetzee, author of Foe, mused about truth and authorship. He recalled the moment in his childhood where he realized that Robinson Crusoe was not, in fact, written by Robinson Crusoe. Then, rather than delivering the traditional lecture, Coetzee told a strange story in which he claimed...
Claudia Roth Pierpont on Nina Simone
This week we recommend Claudia Roth Pierpont’s thoughts on the life of Nina Simone, “A Raised Voice,“ over at the currently open archives of The New Yorker. As Roth Pierpont observes, controversy broke out earlier this year over the announcement of the selection of Zoe Saldana, “a movie star of Dominican descent and a light-skinned beauty along...
How to Kill a Vampire
Just in time for Halloween, making rounds on the internet again are pictures and videos of 19th-century vampire-hunting kits, boxes packed tight with everything you’d need to kill vampires. Most people who have them acknowledge that their collections are replicas, but some people are sure that they’ve got the real deal. Are these kits part of a...
Literature, Emptiness and Empathy
It is a popular opinion that literature promotes empathy in the reader. Author John Green says in his Crash Course video “How and Why We Read,“By understanding language, you will have a fuller understanding of lives other than your own.” In the above video, author Azar Nafisi agrees, asking the question at the 2014 American Library Association Annual...
