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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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" After living in the United States for over 10 years, here is what I have learned about the Fourth of July: it is more of a barbecuing holiday than anything else. "

Michelle Dean

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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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

Michelle Dean

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People

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

" 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. "

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

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

" The phenomenon of Instagram poets - who are also, to be fair, Tumblr poets and Pinterest poets - has been one of the more surprising side-effects of the selfie age. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

" Prestige podcasts, like prestige television shows, tend to have an audience that believes itself literate, well-informed, and reasonable. Listening to podcasts, in this model, is a form of virtue. "

" 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. "

" Even the best novelists are rarely congratulated on the quality of their observations about contemporary life. "

" Television became defensible - and, frankly, worshipped - because the shows started to be so carefully structured, so attentive to language, and so visually interesting that they suddenly caught people's eye. "

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

" Most academic historians accept that historians' own circumstances demand that they tell the story in a particular way, of course. While people wring their hands about 'revisionist' historians; on some level, the correction and amplification of various parts of the past is not 'revisionism' as it is simply the process of any historical writing. "

" We are reminded repeatedly, often by older men, that western civilization has died on the altar of social media. "

" There is an unfortunate side effect of being a person of few words: Sometimes people will assume you are less intelligent than you are. "

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

Michelle Dean

Listen

Women

" 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. "

" Podcast listening carries with it a faint aura of cultural snobbery, a notion that to cue up an episode is to do something highbrow and personally enriching, whether it's a history lecture broadcast from a university or an amateur talk show recorded in someone's garage. "

" 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

" Donald Trump is a man who likes to think he has few equals. "

" 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. "