Two journals started the week by showing off their fancy new faces. Gigantic launched a new web site for the magazine, featuring a chapter from Shya Scanlon‘s Forecast 42 and new fiction by J.A. Tyler. The Barnes & Noble Review debuted a toothsome redesign along with a sobering essay on book publishing by former Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House, Daniel Menaker.
The Debut of Two Fancy New Faces
Keith Gessen’s Longform Podcast
n+1 editor Keith Gessen discusses how the magazine's editors "are slowing down." "We're not mad at anyone anymore," he says. "We think everything is great."
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From the Department of Prehistory
This week in palaeontology: "...how did 30-ton animals larger than four-story buildings have sex?"
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Civilization of the Spectacle
"If culture is purely entertainment, nothing is of importance. If it's a matter of amusement, an impostor can undoubtedly amuse me more than a profoundly authentic person. But if culture signifies more than this, then it's worrying." Sociologist Gilles Lipovetsky interviews the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa about the contemporary collapse between "high" and "low" cultures.
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“Life around the pool”
Recommended Reading: Colm Tóibín on a new biography of the artist David Hockney.
“I made up ice bats, there is no such thing.”
Anne Carson sits down for a profile with the New York Times, and the results are anything but traditional.
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Students and Reading
If we can't teach students to read, should we try teaching more modern books?
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Wake Up and Smell the Covfefe
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me - you can't get fooled again.” Following President Trump's misstatement of a line from The Great Gatsby, The Guardian has a quiz of literary misquotations for your mid-week amusement.
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