Jenny Diski‘s personal take on Roman Polanski and rape, at the London Review of Books.
Rape-Rape
Welcome, Kate!
This week we are delighted to announce that Kate Gavino is joining The Millions as Social Media Editor! Kate is a writer, illustrator, and creator of the website Last Night’s Reading, which was compiled into a published collection by Penguin Books in 2015. Her second book, Sanpaku, was published by BOOM! Studies in August of 2018. She most recently worked as a social media editor at Brooklyn Public Library.
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So Happy For You
Is envy really the worst form of pettiness, as Kierkegaard suggested? Maybe. The great Roman philosopher Cicero had his own, fairly radical thoughts on envy — namely, that “compassion and envy are consistent in the same man; for whoever is uneasy at any one’s adversity is also uneasy at another’s prosperity.”
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Whose Hasn’t?
Sergey Stefanovich’s “The Library” takes viewers through Duncan Fallowell’s library “which has spilled over into every available space and become an art installation in its own right.”
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Scientists on Science Fiction
In New Scientist, several prominent scientists and literary types “nominate their lost sci-fi classics,” from Richard Dawkins on Dark Universe to William Gibson on Random Acts of Senseless Violence.
A helping hand
This week, Melville House is donating all profits from books purchased on their website to Japan disaster relief.
Amazon’s Price-Check Debacle
A lot of people were outraged by initial reports of Amazon’s price-check promotion, and a lot of that had to do with misinformation. Thankfully, Richard Russo sets the record straight about at least one point of contention. (The discount doesn’t apply to books.)
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Revenge of the Pigeons?
Will 2012 be the year they finally rise up against us? A study finds pigeons can do higher math.
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Writing About Home in Pittsburgh
A nice complement to Edan’s essay today about writing in Los Angeles, The Metropolis Case author Matthew Gallaway writes about the challenges of representing his home city of Pittsburgh in his fiction. “For starters, there’s the question of accuracy.”
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