Category: The Defender of the Common
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Manic Pixie Dream Girl — a Defense
Nathan Rabin, film critic and cultural agnostic, coined the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” in 2007. It’s grown in popularity enough that the Nabokovian satirist and aspiring Russian Train Baron Patrick Rothfuss has this to say about himself: So folks — at least certain folks residing in Wisconsin who read The A.V. Club — are…
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A Defense of Baby Worship
The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children [and tempt them towards baby worship] are, first, that children are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in consequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is possible only in the absence of humour. The most unfathomable schools and sages have…
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A Defense of Boring Personalities
No boring subject exists, just bored people. Boring personalities tend to find the subjects they bore into quite fascinating, stimulating, and they usually emerge as experts in their field. Bored people are cool, but dilettantes. My bride’s mother used to tell her essentially that good girls should never be bored. At first blush, I hated…
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A Defense of Spoilers
Spoilers showed up this Christmas, my niece — who’s two years old — gave my sister-in-law and brother-in-law two presents. Both were wrapped. She’d decided exactly what she wanted to give to both of them. Each parent had helped her wrap the present for the other parent. And she wanted to give them first. On…
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A Defense of Criticism
Everyone’s a critic, but should they be? Everyone uses criticism, but does everyone do it well? We live in an age of criticism, an age that destroys a thing to find out what it is, an age that loves to criticize and has all but forgotten how to edify. For this reason, you’ll often find…
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A Defense of Poetry : Inconveniences Rightly Considered
This Defense of Poetry is the start of a poetry podcast in which I’m reading first from my book Inconveniences, Rightly Considered — a collection of poems I wrote since 2005.
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Monomyth Definition: A Defense of The Hero’s Journey
Let me again pick up a standard that has fallen on our literary battlefield: the standard that marks the entrance of The Defender of The Common. It would seem a silly thing to need to defend common things, but in truth we have grown quite accustomed to tearing down good things simply because great things exist.…
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A Defense of Pokémon Go
Three multi-millionaires. A father of four. A PhD in agricultural science. An Oscar winner. A crowd of twelve-year-olds outside a custard joint in St. Louis. A retiree. A CTO. A teen who hadn’t seen the sun in months. Professional artists — a filmmaker, a novelist, a painter, a stylist, a musician. All of these…