This Week in Words – Jan 12

by Treehouse Editors

compiled by Rachel Bondurant

Some in-house news: Brief Encounters is coming back for round two with a new theme. “Your Life According to Computer-Generated Ads” will have the same submission guidelines as before. Stay tuned for the deadline, but in the meantime start brainstorming!

Can we all pause for a moment and thank The Atlantic for dropping this knowledge on us? Watch that video, learn how books were made 65 years ago, and be prepared to have your mind blown. Spoiler alert: printing books used to be huge pain in the ass.

Matt Sailor for NANO Fiction uses the always relevant superhero metaphor (in this case the Flash) to explain why flash fiction is awesome (and also relevant).

For the Paris Review Daily blog, Ariel Djanikian reminisces about a night class in existentialism she took and the grad student who taught it.

And over at w i g l e a f, Anthony Varallo’s flash fiction piece “Unfriend” explores what life would be like if we were confronted face-to-face by the people we remove from our Facebook friends list. If I had nightmares about what would happen when I unfriend people, this story is exactly what they would be made of.