Popular Fictions

But not just fictions—or maybe, fictions in the most expansive sense, including music, television, film, art, etc. Write here if: something is happening in the popular landscape that tells a story to you.

Janelle Monae’s Android Agenda

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1
May 7, 2013
Janelle Monae’s Android Agenda

Janelle Monae’s new single poses, for us, a question: is an android performing as a woman any less drag than a man doing the same? In the year 2719, the android Cindi Mayweather falls in love with a human, an offense for which she is condemned to immediate disassembly and the seizure of her...
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Plots Otherwise Without Aim

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2
April 18, 2013
Plots Otherwise Without Aim

I grew up in the North Jersey precincts of Philip Roth and Amiri Baraka, but the literary home of my youth was in the West. My family traveled by motorhome throughout my childhood and I spent most of my summers reading westerns in situ. In the summer of 1985, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove was...
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A Weaver’s Lover

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2
April 9, 2013
A Weaver’s Lover

When Laura Nyro retired from the music business in 1971, she had produced five studio albums.  She was also 24 years old.  A piano-tuner’s daughter with little classical training, in 1967 Nyro found a manager in an upstart promoter named David Geffen.  She recorded albums in the iconic Brill Building in Manhattan, collaborated with...
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The Gay Politics of Cute

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1
April 2, 2013
The Gay Politics of Cute

  Have you seen this video yet? It’s gone viral, and it’s incredibly adorable. Two gay dads and their sons take the stage to advocate equal marriage, and their son Emmett can’t contain his impatience. Apparently wearied by his dad’s earnest appeal for marriage equality, Emmett repeatedly pushes the microphone away, saying that he...
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Losing It

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0
March 14, 2013
Losing It

Within minutes of the first workout of the first episode of this, the fourteenth season of The Biggest Loser, the camera fades to red and cuts to a commercial as Jackson, a gay bespectacled boy from Layton, Utah, collapses and lies gurgling at the foot of a treadmill. The scene is the first of...
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Why I Don’t Write for Free*

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14
March 6, 2013
Why I Don’t Write for Free*

Avidly is running pieces about the experience and labor of writing. You can read the first, “Why I Write for Free,” here. We’d like to encourage people with different perspectives–academic, non-academic; professional, pleasurable– to send us essays on the questions writing raises for them. Just click on “Submissions” above. — Eds First things first: I’m writing this...
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Why I Write for Free

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6
February 28, 2013
Why I Write for Free

Avidly is starting to run pieces about the experience and labor of writing. We’d like to encourage people with different perspectives–academic, non-academic; professional, pleasurable– to send us essays on the questions writing raises for them. Just click on “Submissions” above. — Eds. 3/6/2013 Ed. Note: Stephanie’s piece has generated some debate. Read Lauren W.’s response, “Why...
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G-Rated Moments of Swoon

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15
February 14, 2013
G-Rated Moments of Swoon

At Avidly, I’ve been exploring the idea that some of literature’s most romantic moments are the G-rated ones from our childhood — those that leave much unsaid and undone, but still manage to strike a sweet, tender nerve within us that continues to resonate through adulthood. Recently, I collaborated with Lisa Schmeiser and Lora...
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Kurdt and Courtney

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1
February 12, 2013
The author's copy. Held on to for a long time.

There’s something to be said for the cultural importance of artifacts not belonging to a well-substantiated narrative, but instead, remaining a random, weird hodgepodge of often misinterpreted but nonetheless dearly savored objects. Sometimes they’re better that way. Take Sassy magazine’s seminal, April 1992 “Ain’t Love Grand? Kurt of Nirvana and Courtney of Hole” cover....
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Zero Point Breaky

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4
February 7, 2013
Zero Point Breaky

For probably dubious reasons, I find myself compelled to rehearse a feeble defense of Zero Dark Thirty (read: a defense of Kathryn Bigelow, director of Point Break, who for some deeply annoying reason also directed Zero Dark Thirty, a film about the CIA hunting down and killing Usama Bin Laden). Both before and in...
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