For the Class of 2013, salsa has always outsold ketchup. For these and other wry conjectures, see the latest edition Beloit College’s annual “Mindset List.” (N.B.: For the class of 2013, “mindset” is not a clunky neologism.)
Inside the Hive-Mind of the Class of 2013
Quantum Invisibility Cloaks: For When Ordinary Invisibility Cloaks Won’t Cut It
This might come in handy if you’re trying to escape a bad review, or even avoid hanging out with your family. A team of physicists has developed a theory for “how to cloak a region of space from the quantum world, thereby shielding it from reality itself.” Take that, Harry Potter.
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Taking Risks on the Page
Over at Catapult, Idra Novey writes on how her experience as a translator changed how she approaches her own work as a novelist. Pair with Magdalena Edwards’s Millions essay on reading Clarice Lispector in English.
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Live Like Philip Roth, Literally
Philip Roth's New York City apartment is now for sale, and with its choice location and its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, we doubt it will be available for very long.
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Waffle House Accuracy
If your characters go on a road trip, do you have to take one, too? When Mary Miller wrote The Last Days of California about a family driving from Alabama to California to meet the rapture, she hadn’t even been to the desert herself. To ensure it was accurate, though, she mapped important destinations on the route. “For Western Louisiana, I thought, ‘Is there actually a Waffle House within forty miles of this border?’ because I wanted it to be accurate. So I had maps, and I was tracking mileage,” she told Down & Out.
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The Task of the Translators
Pevear and Volokhonsky (first names no longer needed, really…like Madonna or Cher) rap with The Wall Street Journal about their luminous (dare we say definitive?) new translation of Tolstoy‘s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories.
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