On this week’s New Yorker Out Loud podcast, Rebecca Mead recommends (seriously) Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth — “the real thing” — for teen-readers who love the Cecily von Ziegesar Gossip Girl series.
Wharton is the Original Gossip Girl
How and How Not to View Africa
Mama Hope, a group that works with local African organizations “to connect them with the resources required to transform their own communities,” has released a great promo featuring four young men who are tired of Hollywood’s African stereotypes. Their complaints are reminiscent of those enumerated in Binyavanga Wainaina’s classic essay “How to Write about Africa,” and also in Laura Seay’s great article from last week, “How Not to Write About Africa.”
Cheese!
“Should we understand a photographic document as being first and foremost an artifact of memory, a light-written ghost? Or is it more important to stress its status as a material thing created from pigment, silver, emulsion, paper, plastic, glass, silicon sensors, pulses of electricity? Or is the photograph primarily an opportunity to take or make, an arena for a special type of action?” On Polaroids, instantaneous photography, and memory over at The Nation.
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Everything Is Fine, Part Deux
The second issue of Little Brother Magazine (edited by Millions emerita and Toronto resident Emily Keeler) features excellent fiction about scandal-plagued mayor Rob Ford. At The Atlantic Cities, Mark Byrne talks with Emily, who describes herself as “addicted” to the drama surrounding the mayor.
“Louche but not bohemian”
In January, I wrote about the release of William Styron’s letters, which reveal, among other things, that Styron requested a book on Nat Turner after visiting “the most enormous house [he’d] ever seen” in Cornwall. At the Times Literary Supplement, you can read more.
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Why?
Jesse Eisenberg’s nephew has a few questions for him in The New Yorker. Listen to Eisenberg read a piece of his new book, Bream Gives Me Hiccups, and face existential doubt in Shouts and Murmurs.
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