Freddie deBoer, a brilliant prose stylist himself, in 2013 highlighted non-fiction essayists and bloggers who “throw heat.” His explanation for why he admires these writers, at the sentence level, contain some gems. Below I excerpt the best descriptions from deBoer on what he loves about other writers. The bolding is mine, not Freddie’s.

First, from Freddie, on the rarity of gorgeous prose styling in the realm of ideas-driven nonfiction writing:

Prose style is typically besides the point in professionally published nonfiction. When people say they want to be writers, in the sense that they want to write for websites and magazines rather than to write a novel, usually it means they want their ideas to be their currency, not their words. Attention to style and voice is more often found in creative writing than in the kind of writing that is referred to, unfortunately, as “content.”

But prose matters. Ideas matter too, but ideas are cheap and easy to find, and good prose certainly isn’t.

On Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I have complained, in the past, about the way that some of Coates’s fans have treated him as the Wise Black Sage. This is a political complaint, of course, one about white guilt and white condescension and the role they still play in defining the reputations of black writers. But it’s also a statement about the shame of reducing writing of this quality to empty piety. Nothing drains writing of its life more surely than treating it like church. Coates is a far more playful, more unpredictable writer than that, and a far more radical one…

“And it’s that way that I want to understand his writing— appropriate to its mission, defined in its scope, and lit always by history and also by fire.”

On Choire Sicha:

The endless, stupid debate about irony has always been predicated on misunderstanding. Irony is a neutral quality; there is no such thing as too much or too little in the world. What people fear, and rightfully so, is the blank, unearned sarcasm that wallpapers the internet. The failure is not of attitude but of experience. 13 year old boys have no right to wax cynical, and so many of the people who operate in an idiom of showy disinterest have neither the experience nor the discrimination to have earned such a stance, which like all weapons must be distributed with discretion. Sicha, on the other hand, has earned his default posture, however you’d like to define that, through understanding: all cynicism comes first through kindness. Sicha wants enough for people to wish that they do their best but is wise enough to know that they won’t…

Weariness in writing is dangerous territory. Deployed clumsily, it risks degrading your work and insulting your audience. Take, for example, film critics who spend every review letting you know how terribly tiring they find it to write about movies. You can always just quit. But, in spite of that danger, when you find the genuine article— when you find someone whose exhaustion is not an affect, but a profound moral conviction— there’s something lovely about it. Sicha is a writer who knows not just how to write like a tired man, but why.

On Caity Weaver:

People say Caity Weaver is funny, and yeah— she’s hilarious. But what I more value in her writing is something that’s much rarer for someone who writes multiple pieces a day: the capacity to surprise. She is, as they say, effectively wild.

On Yasmin Nair:

Don’t get me wrong: Nair is not some “kids these days” scold. I like those best who articulate their beliefs with strength and resolve but without certitude. It’s a tricky line to walk, to remain alive to the limitations of your own understanding without descending into an affected, “look at how open minded I am” pose. To be corrigible, but not manipulable; to listen to advice but to follow your own. On a typical day I feel like doing both is impossible. When I read Nair I feel not only that it’s possible but that I should have already gotten it together to get there, a long while ago. There’s little more to ask of a political writer: when I read Yasmin Nair I whisper to myself, “Be smarter; be better.”

On Jacob Bacharach:

Plenty of people try to squeeze too much into their sentences, but Bacharach can stuff them in, then stretch his arms out so the sentences expand like an accordion, and like an accordion, they make sweet music. The man can pack a suitcase. Same with his references: many try what he tries, few succeed. If you’re going to weave obscure references through your writing, for god’s sakes, you better know what you’re doing. If you aren’t careful you can end up sounding like Dennis Miller trying out his new Toshiro Mifune joke on Dan Fouts when its 31-6 midway through the third quarter. I’ve never read a reference from Bacharach that didn’t precisely land, whether I got it or not; if not, the fault was me, not him. It’s like when someone mumbles and you apologize to them for not understanding.

On Edith Zimmerman:

Self-deprecation is a seductive quality, in writing and in life, and it’s essentially always a mistake. Tell the world that you’re a loser and the world will believe you. What was amazing about Zimmerman’s work at The Hairpin was how she could demonstrate her value in a way that conveyed how she was barely holding it together. It wasn’t “sometimes I feel confident, sometimes I feel insecure!,” which is an angle that should be packed into a rocket and sent into the sun. It was “there’s really no space between the feeling like I’m a pretty cool person and the fact that I just lost a shoe between the subway car and the platform.” For me, personally, it’s not at all that there are times when I feel cool and times when I feel shitty about myself. It’s that the personal momentum that creates the former ensures the latter. Self-confidence is like Mario Kart, where no matter how fucking far ahead you get, the game is rubber banded so that some a-hole who kept hitting the penguin always gets the blue shell at just the wrong time. But sometimes, you’re the one who’s behind, you get the blue shell, and it feels pretty good, because fuck Donkey Kong, anyway. Edith Z really knows how to write about those feels.

If the nadir of our condescending “single lady writer livin’ the dream in NYC” fantasy is Carrie from Sex and the City doing her “I’m a klutzy self-doubting person but I got the shooooooooooes and also I’m horrid and really I get feminism and all but sluts are a thing,” then the flipside is Zimmerman, who writes like someone who is brilliant and funny and really put together but also spends a lot of her time with lipstick on her cheek. I never got swagger, never thought it was real, and don’t know why people want it. To humanize success in the aspirational lifestyle that so many people crave— to make it seem ridiculous without ever ridiculing anybody— that’s a beautiful thing.

On Maureen Tkacik:

Derision is a mode that people think is easy, but it couldn’t be harder. You can’t sell it; by its nature, contempt must indicate effortlessness on the part of the person feeling it. I could write a 3,000 word essay and not approximate the deserved scorn or inherent feminism in the five words “Crap Emails from a Dude.” The woman can just sling it, funny as fuck and so wonderfully mean it can cause the screen on your laptop to bubble. I was Facebook friends with her but I ended up clicking unfriend because I was afraid I would post something stupid and she would write a comment so cutting I’d jump out a window. Is my name on this thing? I’m a little worried. That’s the kind of heat I’m talking about here. And I’m no hothouse flower.

On Wesley Morris:

I don’t share his taste for movies. But his writing reminds me that admiration is better than agreement. He’s got all the tools: precision, ambiguity, concision, expansiveness, minimalism, maximalism, reverence, mockery. Heat. Always, throwing heat.

Morris’s style is conversational except when it’s soaring, playful when not reflective, unfussy except when fussy is perfect. I know that can be true of any writer, but Morris can cycle through each and all within a single sentence. That might sound like stylistic schizophrenia, and it would be if Morris weren’t up for it. He makes it seem effortless, juggling registers and syntax, making the next mental turn seem inevitable even as your marvel at how unexpected it is. The digressive and allusive thing is a common style, and though I am inclined to love it, I’ve come to find it predictable and stale. But Morris makes it inimitable and fresh; his references don’t push, like so many of ours do, trying to uncomfortably occupy an argumentative space where they don’t quite belong. His digressions meander without distracting. In all of it, he trusts the interior logic of his style, a kind of DNA internal to his prose, a self-replicating design that spools out beautifully into complex patterns in all directions.

I am reminded, when I read good prose, that all complicated things can masquerade as simple, if only they achieve true beauty. American prose style has been strangled, for forever, by the serial killer called minimalism, a dimwitted ghost of somebody’s misunderstanding of Raymond Chandler’s parody of Ernest Hemingway’s homage to a Sherwood Anderson who never actually existed. I have read writer after writer ruining themselves, under the profoundly mistaken notion that a sentence of five words has twice the power of a sentence of ten. The advice to “write less,” always expressed as some sort of rare, sage wisdom, now has the character of your grandad looking around your new Kia for the choke. It’s bad advice that has been left on the stove for ages and has become tough and stringy. But so many people still want to chew.

Morris, right now, is my go-to for the refutation: with words, there is no such thing as too few or too many. There is only wrong and just enough. If you are in the habit of giving advice to young writers, and you pull out the same tired advice about adverbs or using no alternatives to “said”— as if that were the root of the problem— I’d ask you to consider that every bad writer has already heard that advice. No one who has contemplated writing for more than a half hour could have possibly missed the appeal to minimalism. If that advice solved the problem, we wouldn’t be surrounded by shitty prose.

This is a beautiful review by Parul Seghal of Mary Gaitskill’s latest book. For example:

Hawthorne ‘‘is aware of the hidden chambers in the heart,’’ he told me. ‘‘He is aware that there are things that people won’t talk about and there are things that people can’t talk about — and those aren’t the same things. He wants to reveal all those layers.’’ Gaitskill’s fiction unfolds in these psychological spaces; she knows that we, unlike plants, don’t always grow toward the light, that sometimes we cannot even be coaxed toward it.

And then this beautiful setting of a scene:

Two weeks later, I took a train to Tivoli, N.Y., a small town in the Hudson Valley where Gaitskill used to live and where she was visiting friends. This is the trip Velvet experiences in ‘‘The Mare,’’ the same shock of tumbling out of the sweltering city into a world so tended, so white and gaudily green. Gaitskill came to collect me from the station. She wore a soft-looking Mets Tshirt, jeans, running shoes — all gray, a gray that almost matches her hair. The effect, from a distance, was rather like chain mail. She was more aloof today, slightly hooded. ‘‘Brace yourself for the preciousness,’’ she said as we drove into town, passing yoga studios and expensive sandwich shops and a laundromat called the Lost Sock.

It was the late-afternoon lull, and most everything was shuttered. No one would sell us an expensive sandwich. We bought lemonade and cookies and sat outside a cafe in the strong sun. Immediately, Gaitskill started rehashing our last discussion, irritated by some of my questions. She thought them foolish. She is fluent when forceful, all the hesitation drains from her voice.

I told her I understood. I told her I was sorry. I told her we would have to discuss these things anyway. (I had asked if her book was bleak or happy, and about how her work had been regarded by critics.) She’s right not to want to focus entirely on the reception of her work — but how else could we correct misconceptions? How else could we discuss the life a book leads in the world? Her pique passed. She seemed satisfied, even, it felt to me, soothed that I could — or would — push back, however pleasantly. But I was left unsettled and alert, eating my cookie in large dry gobs. I thought of a line from ‘‘The Mare’’: ‘‘It felt like she was pressing on my weak spot, just to see what would happen.

Read the whole thing, if you’re feeling literary.

Litany by Billy Collins. Oh, the power of metaphor…

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman’s tea cup.
But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and–somehow–the wine.

Joseph Epstein, one of my favorite writers, has a fun review of two new books on grammar.

N.W. Gwynne argues for the old-school, strict approach to grammar, whereas Steven Pinker argues to relax the old rules and embrace the age of informality, baby. Pinker’s the kind of guy who likes to explode tradition, Epstein says: “Few things give him more pleasure than popping the buttons off what he takes to be stuffed shirts”: the word “whom,” the rules about can vs. may, split infinitives, and so on.

The closing paragraph of the review:

Rather than align myself with the Gwynnians or the Pinkertons, I say a blessing on both their houses, and I would add: Let the language battles between them rage on—except that to do so would expose me to the charge of ending this review on a preposition, which I cannot allow.

It is, shall we say, quite high. His recent review of Lena Dunham’s book has several quotable lines within a well-constructed piece. And his 2007 review of Adam Gopnik’s book about raising children in New York contains various amazing turns of phrase.

First, Dunham. I don’t know Dunham’s work at all, but I have heard of her. The media has perfected the art of building someone up, tearing ’em down, building ’em up, tearing ’em down. I fear we’re in a “tear ’em down” phase now with Dunham, which is not entirely fair.

In any event, some excerpts:

Callow, grating, and glibly nattering as much of the rest of Not That Kind of Girl is, its impact is a series of glancing blows. The self-revelations and gnarly disclosures are stowed alongside the psycho-twaddle, affirmational platitudes, and show-offy candor of someone avid to be liked and accepted—on her own terms, of course, for who she is in all her flawed, bountiful faux pas glory. Can’t blame her for that. It’s what most talented exhibitionists crave and strive for beneath the light of the silvery moon and the mystic ministrations of Oprah, and Dunham’s ability to put it over is as impressive in its way as Madonna’s wire-muscled will-to-power and James Franco’s iron-butterfly dilettantism. Beneath the surface slop and ditzy tics, Dunham possesses an unimpeachable work ethic, a knowledgeable respect for senior artists (as evidenced by her friendship and collaboration with the Eloise illustrator Hilary Knight and her endorsement of the memoirs of Diana Athill), and a canny knack for converting her personal piques, plights, bellyflops, hamster-wheel OCD compulsions, and body-image issues into serial dramedy. That professional nasal drips such as Times columnist Ross Douthat interpret this as symptomatic of an entire generation’s narcissistic disorder says more about them than her. (Douthat probably would have disapproved of James Dean too, told him to stand up straight.)

If I prefer Kylie Minogue to Madonna and the knockabout farce of Comedy Central’s “Broad City” to the clackety solipsism and passive-aggressive caricaturization in “Girls,” it’s a matter of taste, and my taste isn’t the one being targeted and courted by Dunham, Inc. I do think the premature canonization of “Girls” as a breakthrough classic does it no favors, and not just because of the backlash effect triggered every time the fawning media lifts Dunham’s Cleopatra litter higher. The excessive buildup could be the prelude to a steeper devaluation. It’s way too early to tell if “Girls” will endure as a coming-of-age perennial (like “My So-Called Life”), binge favorite (“Gilmore Girls”), or custom sedan (“Sex and the City”), or if it will dwindle into a period artifact à la “Ally McBeal,” which launched a thousand think pieces and op-eds in its heyday. The hipster Brooklyn of “Girls,” with its artisanal affectations, may cast a retrospective glow, or it may date as badly as most of the early mumblecore films, which after only a few years already look and sound like clogged drains.

But it probably won’t matter for Lena Dunham herself, the life-force dervish, who already seems to have outgrown the series, having wrung about as many changes as possible from the antics and predicaments of her alter ego, Hannah Horvath, and those other bobbleheads. With the money, fame (the cover of Vogue), and formal accolades Dunham has achieved (an Emmy award, a Glamour Woman of the Year citation), she’s in the enviable position of being free to do what she wants. But there are invisible strings attached. No longer the idiosyncratic underdog, Dunham has become an iconographic bearer of an entire generation’s promise; a bold-face name in the upper tier of celebrity, feminism, and cultural liberalism, that imaginary green room where Mindy Kaling, Roxane Gay, Tina Fey, and a shimmering hologram of Beyoncé mingle; an advice counselor to other young women; an entrepreneurial success story; an inexhaustible topic of conversation, no matter how exhausted of hearing about her many of us get; in short, a role model, and being a role model entails responsibilities inimical to being an independent operator. (Nobody expects Quentin Tarantino to be a poster boy for higher causes.)

…

Each attack from the right fortifies Dunham’s loyalty from her own constituency on the creative-class liberal left, but a constituency isn’t the same as a fan base—it requires a higher degree of pampering and appeasing. Gender studies / cultural studies grads, who have set up camp on the pop-cult left, can be a prickly lot, ready to pounce on any doctrinal deviation, language-code violation, or reckless disregard of intersectionality. They like their artists and entertainers to be transgressive as long as the transgression swings in the properly prescribed direction. Otherwise: the slightest mistimed or misphrased tweet, ill-chosen remark during a red carpet interview or radio appearance, or comic ploy gone astray can incur the mighty puny wrath of social media’s mosquito squadrons, the hall monitors at Salon and Slate, and Web writers prone to crises of faith in their heroes.

And from the piece about Gopnik (whose writing I generally love):

It isn’t that Gopnik is ungifted or imperceptive, or a slickster trickster like his colleague Malcolm Gladwell, who markets marketing. He is avidly talented and spongily absorbent, an earnest little eager beaver whose twitchy aura of neediness makes him hard to dislike until the preciosity simply becomes too much.

..

“There’s no bad place to watch children grow [Beirut, Rwanda, Baghdad?], but Manhattan is a good one,” he writes. Good? Why, it’s the best! “Ah, the children, the children!” he exclaims. “Has any place ever been better contoured to them than Manhattan is now? We take them out on fall Saturday mornings—Paul Desmond saxophone mornings, as I think of them, lilting jazz sounds almost audible in the avenues—to go to the Whitney or the park to look dutifully at what remains of the avant-garde in Chelsea, or to shop at Fairway, a perfect place, more moving than any Parisian market in its openness, its joy, a place where they have cheap soap lets you taste of six different olive oils [sic].” This bountiful note of yuppie triumphalism warbles through the book—of the label “yuppie” itself, Gopnik gloats, “We were called that, derisively, before the world was ours”—as the pride and pleasure that he and his co-evals take in their exalted taste buds and their little geniuses reflect flatteringly on their own achievements, material sense of well being, and immersion in the vital, fizzing stream of urban resplendence.

AND YUPPIE TRIUMPHALISM en-twines with New York chauvinism, as civic pride fluffs its chest feathers and proclaims bragging rights. It is tiresome and a little puzzling how New Yorkers feel the need to keep asserting that “We’re Number One.” London is a world-class capital with an all-star historical cast, but you don’t hear London authors crooning and crowing about their city’s brio, flair, resilience, and iconic status at regular intervals. London’s greatness is taken more in stride by the locals. But here it’s as if the influx of wealth that has spiked real estate values since the 9/11 bounceback has endowed the city with some of the smug exclusivity of a gated community.

…

If it’s trying for the wife to have Gopnik leaving a vapor trail around the house when strange exhilaration hits, it can’t be easy for the kids having their father always hovering around for material, taking down their latest witticism at the dinner table to work into a future piece, documenting every rite of passage in Rea Irvin typeface. There are times when Gopnik’s children seem to be trying to humor him, obliging dad with enough whimsical interludes and reusable anecdotes to get through the winter.

…

The gnawing resentment of creative talents who never achieved what they desired or never received the breaks they felt they were due is a rich, stubbly grown-up subject that deserves better than the gentle spray of ironies that Gopnik employs whenever a fanciful notion dials his number.