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" A good novelist pays attention to his characters. A good biographer pays attention to the documents before her. A good critic pays close attention to the thing she's brought to evaluate. "

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" Beauty pageants in general are foreign and noxious to me: I can barely muster the energy to put on lip gloss and mascara. "

Michelle Dean

Beauty

Lip

I Can

" If you care about a subject, there's a podcast for it. "

" Articulateness is not the only way that intelligence manifests itself. "

" Saying that you spend Christmas alone is, to most middle-class Americans, akin to confessing a terminal illness. "

" I read almost no romantic fiction, in part because I barely believe in romance in the age of Tinder. "

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

" Mass market paperback thrillers are a dime a dozen. The trick is to find something that actually sticks to the ribs. "

" In an age where television is viewed as the best medium to 'tell stories,' narrative often stands in for substance on would-be prestige shows. "

" Dan Brown and the 'Da Vinci Code' have been around well over a decade now, and to be perfectly honest, both he and it have become a joke. "

" 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. "

" Push the envelope too far as a female artist, and you may only earn an ocean of ink expressing concern for your delicate constitution, amounting to a caution against playing on traditionally male wavelengths. "

" Few reporters get to do what Kelly McEvers does in every episode of 'Embedded': go deep into a story and tease out what is really happening. "

Michelle Dean

Out

Happening

" I still think, most of the time, when people called shows like 'The Sopranos' or 'Deadwood' 'art' that they were correct. "

Michelle Dean

Art

People

" Vacation reading is not a new concept. Ever since the 19th century, when novels were considered relatively sinful indulgences, leisure and fiction-reading have been closely associated. "

" Television was not cool among the young people of my era, the last years of the '90s and the early '00s. It was not just old people who'd castigate you for watching anything but public television. We young people scoffed at each other about it. "

" Most people do not pay attention to the publisher's imprint on a given book. "

" Among journalists, there is a saying: 'If it bleeds, it leads.' This can result in some serious hustling - and some serious sloppiness - whenever a crime occurs. The public's longing to see and hear salacious details is, basically, endless. "

" People spend their entire lives trying to construct something to grab onto: a family, a home, a business. Rarely does anyone seem to manage to get much ground under their feet. "

" We do learn a thing or two from art. It may not be the one-to-one instruction of a moral lesson or the rote learning of a grammatical rule or mathematical concept. But the habits of mind art cultivates are important. "

" There is something a little vulgar about writing a novel that is too close to the present, too concerned with current events, too eager to critique technological advancements. "

" Peak TV has resulted in beautiful shows that have nothing in particular to tell us about humanity. "

" Perhaps crisis forces commonality of purpose on one another. "

" The real discovery of having your consciousness raised was never that you'd be handed tools; it was the discovery that the only real leverage you get in life is yourself. "

" There's no good way to be the center of a media maelstrom you did not choose for yourself. "

" I've come, even as a feminist, to dread the phrase 'female friendship,' because it tends to signal overdetermined relationships. "

" The plot of 'Stranger Things' is so simple that even a brief description risks spoiling it. "

" Poems are ideally suited, in some ways, to social media because they pack so much meaning into so little language. "

" A presidential candidate changing churches is hardly unusual. Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, and Rand Paul have all aligned themselves with different faiths throughout their lives. "

" Hillbilly stereotypes have always made it easier for middle-class whites to presume that racism is the exclusive province of 'that kind' of person. "

" Many people, I've noticed by informally polling friends, are prone to distinguishing a beach read by genre. Some people thought all thrillers are beach reads; others thought all romances are. Some people thought only mass market paperbacks are eligible for beach read standards. "