Poet Kazim Ali on Ramadan at The Kenyon Review.
“Tell me the difference between entity and eternity.”
Win Zak Smith’s Gravity’s Rainbow
The Quarterly Conversation is holding a contest for readers. They’ll be giving away a hardcover copy of Zak Smith’s illustrated Gravity’s Rainbow.
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“на один процент” is “one percent” in Russian
Apropos of yesterday’s round-up of Russian social unrest: the children of Russia’s 1%.
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Turn to Page 394
We lost another great one this week in Alan Rickman. He will be remembered forever by fans of the Harry Potter series as the maybe-evil, maybe-heroic professor Severus Snape, but the Potter series wasn’t Rickman’s only brush with the literary. Here are a few recordings of him reading from Shakespeare, Proust, and Thomas Hardy.
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Mind Games
“I suspect ‘chess rage’ and ‘road rage’ are neighboring neural impulses.” Tom Russell at Guernica Magazine has written a fascinating essay on a summer spent playing chess in Bryant Park and the unexpected artistic beauty of the game. Here’s a cursorily-related review of The Chess Machine, a book which features an unbeatable chess-playing automaton controlled by a dwarf.
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#history
“if you’re looking to sound clever, you could call it an ‘octothorpe’, the tongue-in-cheek term coined at Bell to describe it.” The history of hashtags, and other words that the Internet has given us.
Odd Bits
Pig-blood-flavored ice cream and Crispy Testicles anyone? Jennifer McLagan, Australian-born, Toronto-based author-chef, teaches us how to cook the rest of the animal in her new book, Odd Bits.
“Let us not desert one another”
In honor of Jane Austen’s recent birthday: five feminist lessons, culled from her body of work.
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