Compassionate procrastination for vocab nerds! Improve your vocabulary (or study for the SAT) while helping end world hunger at Free Rice.
Free Rice
Tuesday New Release Day: Haruf, Bakker, Moss, Peach, Prospectus
New in fiction this week: Benediction by Kent Haruf and Ten White Geese by past IMPAC winner Gerbrand Bakker. In non-fiction: Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss’s food industry exposé excerpted in the recent Times Magazine. From the other side of the food spectrum is Issue 6 of Lucky Peach. And it’s a big day for baseball fans: the 2013 Baseball Prospectus is here.
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Buy Debt Without Going Into Debt
David Graeber’s Debt (which was just reviewed in the New York Review of Books) is available at a 40% discount all weekend long.
Style-Elements
A question that plagues American writers: how would the lit world be different if everybody followed the rules in The Elements of Style? The answer: it would look like this.
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On “Influencers” and Filters
The publishers Hamish Hamilton/Penguin UK have begun a “social media experiment” in which they’ll use PeerIndex to single out “influencers” to review and promote books. “Influencers” will be determined by the breadth and reach of their social media presence, and they’ll be selected based on their relevance to certain books. This kind of marketing is exactly what Eli Pariser warns about in The Filter Bubble. (For a quick summary, listen to his TED talk.)
Paperback Swap
Paperback Swap lets you can swap your books with other community members.
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Il Maestro
Everyone knows that Joyce grew up in Dublin, but few people know that he spent much of his life in Italy. At Open Letters Monthly, you can read a long piece on his years in the city of Trieste. (You can also try your hand at our quiz.)
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True Story
Over at Granta, Melissa Febos writes about truth. As she puts it, “The true telling of our stories often requires the annihilation of other stories, the ones we build and carry through our lives because it is easier to preserve some mysteries.”
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I love this thing! I used to play obsessively when I started my current job and wasn’t given anything to do. It actually helps you study for the GRE, because it’s Computer Adaptive or whatever.
I think I’ll go play a few (hundred) rounds.