2011
-
Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Here. Here are some pictures of birds flying. Here are some old Dutch maps. Here are some new developments on wrong assumptions about Mars. Here are some practice babies.
-
The Rumpus Book Club Interviews Andrew Foster Altschul
The Rumpus Book Club talks with Andrew Foster Altschul about Deus Ex Machina, Reality TV, the loss of truth, and what it’s like to visit a porn set in the name of research.
-
USAF and Medusa
The only problem with naming your new weapons system “Gorgon Stare” as the Air Force has done: Medusa’s lapidogenic vision was actually used against her. In fact, it was classic asymmetrical warfare: the vastly more powerful Gorgon’s Stare against mortal little Perseus and…
-
“My Hero”
“It’s hard to think of a novelist, let alone another singer-songwriter, who takes on such diverse narrative viewpoints with Bush’s aplomb: a foetus during nuclear war (‘Breathing’), a weather-machine inventor’s daughter (‘Cloudbusting’), a suicide bomber (‘Pull Out the Pin’) or…
-
“Dear Good Ole Boys of the Literary South”
“You try to make people cry — in workshops and at parties. […] But just to make sure no one thinks you’re really soft, you kill off as many dogs as you can on the page, add in brawls, blood…
-
Junk and the American Dialect Society
Ben Zimmer makes a case for “junk” to be the word of 2010. (via TheBookBench)
-
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
“No less an authority than William Burroughs has called Confessions ‘the first, and still the best, book about drug addiction… No other author since has given such a completely analytical description of what it is like to be a junky…
-
Wallace-L and the Howling Fantods
David Foster Wallace’s “secret life as a philosopher” and the story of how Fate, Time, and Language, his honors theses turned postmortem book, came to be published.
-
Danya Glabau’s Tech Links
Cell phones are increasingly cropping up in prisons, giving inmates the resources to organize strikes and play FarmVille. Travel websites Expedia and Orbitz are creating controversy by dropping American Airlines flights from search results. Tech bubble 2.0: Facebook is worth $50…