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Moira Donegan

All articles by this author

Episode 24: At the Movies

Episode 24: At the Movies

Most film critics that write today regularly are essentially publicists for Hollywood films. Their criticism is intermingled with this form of entertainment journalism that really has nothing to do with criticism. So a lot of times when you read a film review now, in addition to getting a lot of plot description—which I don’t think is really necessary in film criticism anymore, because everybody knows everything about films before they come out now because of the internet—you get a lot of histories of the people who are in the films or made the films.

Episode 23: Inherited Disorders

Episode 23: Inherited Disorders

“It started as a normal novel about fathers and sons, one of those, so I always knew I wanted to write about fathers and sons. And I thought I could do it in a realist way, tracking a father and a son through a relationship or whatever, and I was completely unable to do that. There were two or three years where essentially, everyday, I would start from scratch. I liked the starting out, I liked having a father and a son in some weird situation, and then I would sort of try to maneuver them in a realist way, and it would fall apart and collapse. After a couple of years of this and feeling crazy, probably under the influence of some other books that had somewhat similar forms, I realized I could just sort of take each of the beginnings and turn them into their own mini story and have the relationship kind of come out of the way the stories interacted with each other.”

Army Wives

Army Wives

On Fort Buchanan

With its recycling of soap opera dialogue and its knowing embrace of cliché, Fort Buchanan seems to imply that melodrama applies the same logic to emotion that pornography applies to sexuality—that it creates a world in which vast and spontaneous intensities of feeling are exchanged with prolific frequency and little consequence.

Is Moira Pregnant?

Is Moira Pregnant?

On signing up for health care

There’s some evidence that even with the subsidies, many people still can’t afford to go to the doctor: a recent Gallup poll found that 31 percent of Americans had delayed seeking medical treatment because of the cost, even though the number of insured people has increased since the passing of the health-care law. Ours is a now system that demands long-term planning almost exclusively from people whose work is scarce enough and precarious enough to preclude even short-term security.

Episode 18: Labor & Letters

Episode 18: Labor & Letters

On this episode of the n+1 podcast, podcast editor Aaron Braun speaks with Jo Livingstone about intern labor in publishing. Mixed in with their conversation are excerpts from n+1’s Labor and Letters Symposium in April discussing the state of labor in publishing today. Nikil Saval moderates the Symposium panel, featuring guests Aaron Braun, Sarah Jaffe, Maxine Phillips, and Maida Rosenstein.