The podcast revolution has taught us that women's voices aren't just pleasurable to listen to, they are essential.

Michelle Dean

Categorized in : Us Listen Revolution Women

'Millennials' has become a kind of modern swearword, a slur directed at people in their early 20s.

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I like debate and argument, so I'm usually all right with disagreement, and I'm even all right if the critic doesn't come to a clear thumbs up or thumbs down. But I need the disagreement to have some kind of line I can follow on the map. I like following an interesting mind along it.

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The diversity of perspective, the unwillingness to generalise - those are good traits in countries as they are in art.

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There has long been an argument in New York about what, exactly, the purpose of book awards ought to be. One model sees them as a celebration of the unquestioned best and brightest, a triumphal parade for marquee authors who have published in a given year.

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While 'Twilight''s popularity was undeniable among both the teenagers they were aimed at and middle-aged women who flocked to the series in droves, Meyer has drawn her share of criticism for her writing. Some feminist critics assailed what they saw as Bella's mooning over her vampire lover.

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Summer is always a tricky time to recommend new literary fiction. The big releases do not hit until fall.

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It is no secret, of course, that people have strong feelings about fat - feelings that seem only to have been inflamed by the sense, in western countries, that there is an obesity crisis afoot. Concerns about health have mutated into a kind of panic attending any mention of fat people at all.

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A lot of people produce podcasts in which they simply ramble on for hours about themselves and their lives. There is something very poignant about the volume of human desire to be heard out there in the Wild West of podcasts.

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I have deliberately arranged my life so that I see pictures of cute animals on the Internet every day.

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The desire to abdicate, to give up - for me, that's primal.

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Telling a story about someone has enormous power. People forget a headline. They remember a story.

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I tend to judge a piece of criticism by how smart I find the argument. This, I know,, is not how everyone does it.

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Bad criticism recites rote arguments. The shame of rote arguments isn't just that they're cliches, though they are, but that they tend to hide from us why a critic is actually thinking what they're thinking.

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I don't care about the bare fact that anyone liked or didn't like a book or movie; they can only interest me in that bare fact by writing an intelligent review.

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The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.

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When James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces' turned out to be largely bunk, critics everywhere secretly rejoiced. They knew it, they said.

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The first thing I remember feeling about the 2016 U.S. election was a kind of speechlessness.

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When a woman shouts, she isn't usually praised for it. She's condemned as aggressive and coarse.

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Perhaps crisis forces commonality of purpose on one another.

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For a long time, it seemed as if podcasting was a male realm, but no longer. Sure, there are lots of men doing podcasts, but women are voicing a lot of the form's biggest hits. 'Serial,' the podcast that made podcasts a phenomenon, was narrated by a woman.

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