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.
Beauty pageants in general are foreign and noxious to me: I can barely muster the energy to put on lip gloss and mascara.
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.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to publish - or read - books that have a wide potential audience. But it does generate a certain plodding sameness of tone and subject matter that plagues a lot of contemporary American fiction.
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.
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.
Research can be a boon to a novelist - there are more things in heaven and Earth than can be dreamt of in a single writer's philosophy - or it can become a hindrance, a thick layer of algae that weighs down the storytelling.
When James Frey's 'A Million Little Pieces' turned out to be largely bunk, critics everywhere secretly rejoiced. They knew it, they said.
The children of the 1980s were the last before a lot of things changed. We were the last generation not to have cell phones, not to have video games, not to have parents who worried if we strayed from the yard.
Poems are ideally suited, in some ways, to social media because they pack so much meaning into so little language.
I tend to judge a piece of criticism by how smart I find the argument. This, I know,, is not how everyone does it.
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.
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.
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.
The diversity of perspective, the unwillingness to generalise - those are good traits in countries as they are in art.
The podcast revolution has taught us that women's voices aren't just pleasurable to listen to, they are essential.
'Millennials' has become a kind of modern swearword, a slur directed at people in their early 20s.
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.
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.
The 'World Wide Web', as people quaintly called the Internet in 1996, was more or less made up of text. There was no YouTube. There was no Facebook. There was, however, Usenet, a loose and difficult-to-navigate assortment of message boards.
