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Josiah Duran

http://josiahduran.com

He Was the Real Thing

I have only known Tom Stoppard in a small way, through reading his plays, which I’ve never even seen performed. And yet, when I saw the retrospectives and obituaries last week, I felt that a pillar had been knocked out of our cultural temple as English speakers. Stoppard was

Emotion Review - Unrequited Love

Imagine that you’ve been eating bland food all your life and suddenly you discover salt. It’s a revolution. The miraculous little mineral makes everything it touches better. How did you ever live without it? But imagine that this particular salt you’ve discovered triggers a craving. You put

Gratitude

The High-School Essay Problem

There’s a problem that crops up for the argumentative writer which I call “the high-school essay problem.” In high school, you’re taught—I was, at least—to stake out, early in your essay, a clear thesis. A claim you’ll go to bat for, a hill you’ll

Missing

You and I go back a long ways, back to kitchen counter conversations and air-conditioned afternoons. I paced the tile floors and sucked a spoon of peanut butter, you pounded water and leaned against the cabinets. We were young in those days, sure of ourselves. We had everything in the

I Saw Masquerade

And I liked it even better than Ariel's Undersea Adventure

Dress Like You’re Selling Something

As a writer, I like to find words for things. String of words that build strangely compelling phrases. Lone words that encapsulate. Even technical terms bring delight—how satisfying it is to distinguish electrocution from electrification, to know an aviary from an apiary! Add to this my love for good

Sitting Down on a Wet Afternoon to Write

My books are all organized and stacked on the floor, my chamomile-rooibos-mint blend is brewed up and just slightly too warm to drink, a jazz record that I picked without great discretion or taste is playing from my computer—the mood is conducive to writing. So, let’s write. But:

My Life Without a Smartphone

Let’s Be Romantics

An Antidote to Anomie