The economist
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Weekly Geekery
New York Times readers who ignore The Economist: Danger, groupthink ahead. Data suggests police de-escalation can work. Goats have feelings, too. (Sheep, not so much.) Babies brainwash you with their cuteness. If the Ghostbusters need props, who you gonna call? MIT professors!
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The Rumpus Interview with John Reed
John Reed discusses Snowball’s Chance, his parody of Animal Farm, and the lawsuits, debates, and discoveries that followed the book’s publication.
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Tinker, Tailor, Novelist, Spy
It is not so surprising that so many writers have worked in intelligence. Writers create plots; spies uncover them. In a sense, all writers function like spies—observing the people around them, studying character types, becoming flies-on-the-wall for the purpose of…
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Video on Demand
How many times have we been told that digital technology will fundamentally alter the way we interact with text? There was hypertext fiction, which added hyperlinks so you could choose your own path through a story. Pfft. There was the…
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Hakuna Matata, Shakespeare
Shakespeare may have felt anxiety, but he was no worrier. More from The Economist on how the word entered our lexicon, in a review of Worrying by Francis O’Gorman. O’Gorman, who traces the word’s rise through literary modernism’s focus on…
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Lost Words For A Spruce Tree
Over at The Hairpin, Isabelle Fraser interviews Ann Wroe, obituary writer for The Economist. Wroe has written obituaries for J.D. Salinger, Aaron Swartz, and the 25-year old carp that was “England’s best-loved fish”. On Marie Smith, the last person to speak Eyak, an…
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After Garfield
The Economist has a comprehensive article up about how the Internet has revolutionized the stagnant comics industry by demolishing barriers to publication and enabling artists to make a profit in new ways. Sure, they’re five or ten years late to the…
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The Deckle Edge
If you’re still reading paper books—and more notably, hardbacks—you’ve probably noticed some of the pages look a little rough around the edges. Two years ago, The Millions published a piece on the “deckle edge,” a byproduct of the paper-making process that causes…